Palantir's New Senior VP Swaps Lords Pass for Labour Leverage

Facing a growing storm of opposition to its role in England’s National Health Service (NHS), Palantir’s UK branch last week announced a major new signing: Tom Watson, former deputy leader of the governing Labour party.

Lord Watson’s new position contrasts starkly with his public views a decade ago: in 2015, he brought a legal challenge against the UK Government over its plans to “spy on citizens.” Now, he’s taking up a role at the world’s most prominent spy-tech company.

Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir in the UK, said that Lord Watson “brings deep understanding of how AI is changing the ways the state can help people in Britain.” The firm added that Watson would be taking a leave of absence from the Lords and giving up his parliamentary pass while working for them. But it’s perhaps not hard to see what other attractions the background of Palantir’s new senior vice president held for the firm.

Lord Watson has a long history in the Labour party — serving as a parliamentarian for over 20 years, including time as a minister for defense and for digital affairs.

Palantir may be hoping that he can help them as they face a crunch moment: a ‘break clause’ in its contract with the NHS, which could allow the current Government to bring an early end to its £330m role in the health service’s Federated Data Platform (FDP).

The Government has said this decision would need to be made by December this year, and ministers have so far been tight-lipped about their intentions. However, there is an undeniable groundswell of opposition to Palantir keeping its role, with concerns ranging from chair Peter Thiel’s open hostility to the NHS — he has said it “makes people sick” — to the firm’s close alignment with United States President Donald Trump and support for his ICE paramilitaries — to the threat its growing role poses to UK ‘sovereignty.’ Two influential cross-party parliamentary committees have called for the NHS contract to end; and ministers have faced frequent questions and debates over the company’s role.

Palantir may also be hoping that Watson can fill the gap left by the recent downfall of another Labour Lord: Peter Mandelson.

Mandelson’s lobbying firm, Global Counsel, counted Palantir among its key clients. Following his appointment as British Ambassador to the USA, Lord Mandelson continued to hold a stake in Global Counsel, which continued to advise Palantir.

While there has never been public clarity around how this conflict of interest was managed, relations between Mandelson and Palantir appear to have remained cordial. The Ambassador accompanied then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer on a visit to Palantir’s office during his first trip to Washington DC in 2025 — the second stop after the White House.

Files disclosed by the UK Government show that later that same year, Lord Mandelson emailed Starmer’s chief of staff offering to set up a meeting between the Prime Minister and Palantir founder and chairman Peter Thiel, describing him as a “celebrated techie”.

However, in unfortunate news for Palantir, Mandelson was last year sacked as Ambassador following revelations of his close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. This was followed in 2026 by allegations that he leaked sensitive internal government information to the convicted sex offender in 2009, and advised that his own government should be threatened over proposed taxes on bankers’ bonuses.

The question for Palantir now is whether Lord Watson can fill the hole left by Lord Mandelson as a well-connected former Labour minister.

It would be hard to argue that lobbying and political influence has not played an important role in Palantir’s impressive racking up of UK Government contracts in recent years.

Not long after a secretive 2019 meeting between Palantir cofounder and board chair Peter Thiel and then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, which was not disclosed at the time, Palantir won its first NHS contract, agreeing to work for a token payment of £1 at the height of the pandemic.

The firm then worked to build out from this beach-head: new contracts, backed by further political engagement and a revolving door between Palantir and the civil service.

According to Bloomberg, Louis Mosley set out the company’s approach ‘in an email entitled “Buying our way in…!” sent in Sept. 2021, which outlined “hoovering up” small businesses serving the NHS to “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance.”’

The movement of government staff in and out of Palantir becomes almost too much to follow: directors and chairs at NHS trusts — the organizational units of the health service — are revealed to be paid Palantir advisors; the top civil servant at the Department of Health and Social Care is found to have advised a member of the Palantir-lead NHS consortium; former senior defense officials and ministers are snapped up too.

As one MP recently said of an outgoing senior civil servant responsible for the Federated Data Platform, the NHS system being delivered by Palantir: “Given Palantir’s habit of lobbying civil servants and the revolving door from government, I wait to see where she will end up.”

So Lord Watson’s appointment seems to be very much the rule, not the exception. But it should be no less worrying for that. Palantir’s colossal resources allow it to fund a vast army of former insiders, fixers, and lobbyists. Even if the UK’s flimsy rules on lobbying are followed, this still has a corrosive effect on our democracy, and our ability to make an informed, balanced judgement on whether we want Thiel’s firm — with its openly-advertised goal of US technological dominance — to have a role at the heart of the UK state.

Perhaps one small ray of hope is this: if Palantir is so desperate to sub Lord Watson in for the now disgraced Lord Mandelson, is the company finally starting to feel that it can’t take its role in the UK’s health service for granted?