The relationship between Palantir and the British state has never been simple, but it has always been deep. Rooted in the CIA-funded world of counterterrorism, the American data analytics firm has, over the past decade, quietly woven itself into some of the most sensitive institutions in the United Kingdom—the National Health Service, policing, defense, and a dozen other public bodies. To its critics, this was never accidental. They see a deliberate corporate strategy, pursued contract by contract, tender by tender, often through frameworks designed to avoid parliamentary scrutiny, and ultimately aimed at embedding the company so deeply within the British state that it becomes impossible to remove. To its defenders, Palantir represents the necessary future of public administration—a uniquely capable analytical tool that helps governments process vast and chaotic data, spot patterns humans inevitably miss, and, in moments of national crisis, make decisions that save lives. Somewhere between those poles sits the political establishment, and nowhere is that tension more vividly embodied than in the orbit of Andy Burnham, the powerful Mayor of Greater Manchester. Some of Burnham’s closest allies fear Palantir profoundly. Others, including several key officials he has personally kept in place, quietly advocate for it. At the center of that schism stands an improbable cast: a left-wing MP who has made opposition to Palantir a matter of political conscience; a secretive intelligence-connected advisor who has become the British government’s most effective bridge to Trump’s America; and a Palantir executive bearing one of the most notorious surnames in Britain’s political history. It is a story about surveillance, profit, and power—and about how deeply these forces have become entangled in the everyday machinery of British governance. It is also a story that raises questions few in authority are willing to answer.
Among the most vocal parliamentary opponents of Palantir is Clive Lewis, a Labour MP whose political identity has been shaped by his willingness to speak uncomfortable truths. Lewis is a vocal supporter of Burnham’s ambition to reach Downing Street, and he has been relentless in warning that Palantir’s expansion across the NHS, policing, defense, and other public services amounts to a slow-motion occupation of the British state. He describes it as a “coordinated strategy” by the company to embed itself not just in government contracts but in the very architecture of decision-making. What troubles him most, however, is the legal and constitutional dimension. Palantir is an American company. It operates under US law—under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under the Patriot Act, under rules that British citizens have never consented to and have no power to change. In Lewis’s view, this leaves the United Kingdom “dangerously exposed to the whims of a shady spy tech company that operates under the laws of the US, not our own.” These are not abstract anxieties. They are the fears of a parliamentarian who has studied the company’s history, who has read about its work with ICE and the US military, and who has concluded that Palantir’s model depends less on the quality of its software than on the weakness of the institutions that purchase it. Lewis has made it his role to ask the questions others prefer to avoid: Who authorizes the collection of data on ordinary citizens? What oversight exists over a foreign company’s access to the most intimate details of people’s lives? And what happens when a corporation’s commercial self-interest diverges from the public interest? For critics like Lewis, these are not hypotheticals. They are warnings. And they represent a fundamental test of whether modern democratic governments can still control the technology industries they have allowed to become so powerful.
If Lewis embodies the resistance to Palantir’s influence, then Varun Chandra represents the countervailing force—the man who has come to symbolize a political establishment that has decided to work with, rather than against, the new corporate powers. Chandra is the British government’s chief liaison to the technology sector, responsible for managing the relationship between Westminster and Big Tech. He is a former partner at Hakluyt, the ultra-secretive corporate intelligence firm founded by former senior officers of MI6. When Chandra became managing partner there at just 34, he was the first person in the firm’s history to reach that position without ever having worked for the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service. He then founded Hakluyt Capital, a venture capital fund that invested heavily in AI start-ups, positioning himself at the intersection of espionage, finance, and cutting-edge technology. Chandra’s rise has never been the product of luck. He is described by those who know him as charming, exacting, intensely discreet, and utterly focused on results. He operates through informal channels—private dinners, off-the-record briefings, personal introductions—rather than through the formal machinery of government. And it is precisely that style that has made him indispensable. He is not a civil servant, yet he carries the authority of a minister. He is not a businessman, yet he controls a multi-million-dollar investment vehicle. He has spent years cultivating relationships across the Atlantic, in both parties, and has become, in the words of one former Whitehall official, “the only person who can walk into any room in Washington and know who to call.” His proximity to power is not accidental; it is the product of years of careful relationship-building, and it has made him the quiet prince of Britain’s tech policy.
Chandra’s most consequential relationships, however, have always been with Americans. When Sir Keir Starmer visited Washington in 2025, the Cabinet Office’s senior civil servant, Michael Ellam, reportedly told the UK’s then-ambassador that Chandra was better “stylistically” than any career diplomat when it came to handling decision-makers in Trump’s inner circle. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, upon taking office, singled Chandra out for praise, describing him as having played an “essential” role in the US trade deal reached that year. And according to the New Statesman, Chandra enjoys a particularly strong rapport with Stephen Miller, the White House’s controversial homeland security adviser—a relationship that has allowed the UK to maintain a channel to the most hardline elements of the American administration. Chandra’s ties to Palantir’s orbit appear similarly deep. Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir cofounder who remains close to the company’s leadership, dined with Chandra in December 2024. Shortly afterward, Lonsdale told The Shawn Ryan Show that he had been with “someone in Keir Starmer’s government” and that even the Labour Party’s hard left understood the need to cut the state’s bureaucracy. “Bureaucracies are like these cancers, man,” Lonsdale said. The casualness of the remark was chilling; the message, however, was blunt. What these stories reveal is not simply that Chandra is well-connected, but that he has deliberately positioned himself as the point man in managing Palantir’s interests in the UK—a role that suits a political class increasingly comfortable with the idea that private surveillance technology is an acceptable tool of public governance.
The web of connections between the British government and Palantir has, predictably, produced conflicts of interest. The Financial Times revealed that the Department of Health’s permanent secretary had to recuse herself from decisions involving the NHS data platform because she had previously worked for Carnall Farrar, a consulting firm that was part of Palantir’s bidding consortium on that very contract. That disclosure—quiet, technical, and buried in the recesses of a civil service code—said everything about the culture that surrounds Palantir’s dealings in the UK. Rules are followed, but just barely. Recusals are filed, but only after the damage is done. And the revolving door between government, consulting, and technology continues to spin. For the politicians and officials involved, these entanglements are framed as necessary accommodations with the demands of the modern world. But for the general public, they raise an unsettling question: if the people who are supposed to be regulating technology companies are themselves the product of those companies’ influence, then who is really in charge? The answer, implicit in everything from the Whitehall dinners to the venture capital funds, is that no one is entirely in control. The British state has become so dependent on a small number of technology firms—many of them foreign—that it can no longer imagine governing without them. And Palantir, with its secretive history, its intelligence connections, and its quasi-imperial ambition, has found the perfect environment in which to thrive: a political class that has already accepted the premise that some problems are too complex for democracy and too important to be left to the public sector.
Finally, there is Louis Mosley, Palantir’s UK chief executive, who has emerged as the most unapologetic defender of the company’s role in British public life. Mosley is the grandson of Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, and the weight of that surname has followed him throughout his career. Yet Mosley has never sought to hide from it. Rather, he has weaponized his own history of defying expectations, presenting himself as a man unafraid to say uncomfortable things. And uncomfortable things he has said—most recently, his assertion that “if NATO went to war, it would go to war using Palantir.” The comment was meant to underscore the company’s indispensability; the unintended message, however, was that the Western alliance’s most sensitive military machinery now depends on the good will of a single private corporation. Mosley has been equally blunt in dismissing the firm’s critics, accusing them of putting “politics before performance” and insisting that Palantir’s record speaks for itself. In a sense, that is precisely the problem: Palantir’s record includes not just its celebrated successes in counterterrorism and public health, but also its documented controversies, its lax oversight, its willingness to push legal boundaries, and its quiet cultivation of political influence. Mosley embodies the paradox of the entire enterprise: a man who wants to be judged purely on capability, operating at the heart of a system in which power has always been about more than performance. The debate over Palantir is therefore not really about technology at all. It is about values—about what kind of society Britain wants to be, what kind of relationships it wants with enormous private corporations, and what it is willing to give up in exchange for the promise of safety, efficiency, and control. Those are questions no minister, no civil servant, and no corporate executive has yet been able to answer definitively. And until they do, the uncomfortable dance between the state and the spy-tech company will continue.
