UK's £240M Palantir Deal Tied to Starmer-Mandelson HQ Visit
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- UK government signed a £240 million ($323m) defence contract with Palantir in January and a separate £330 million ($444m) Ministry of Health contract in November 2023, despite publicly criticising both the company and Mandelson
- Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson visited Palantir's Washington, DC headquarters in February 2025 — 11 months before the uncontested contract was awarded; the Cabinet Office later told the Good Law Project the meeting was 'informal' and un-minuted
- Peter Mandelson was arrested in late February over allegations he maintained a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 sex offence conviction and may have shared market-sensitive information; Mandelson's now-shuttered consultancy Global Counsel had Palantir as a client
- Palantir struck a 'strategic partnership' with Israel in January 2024, actively recruiting from cyber intelligence Unit 8200 and integrating its technology into Israeli command-and-control workflows used to compile Gaza targeting lists, according to Open Intel
- Palantir's NHS contract is worth £23.5 million ($31.6m) after initially accepting just £1 in March 2020 for COVID emergency work; a 2022 email from regional head Louis Mosley titled 'Buying our way in…!' outlined a strategy to 'hoover up' smaller NHS rivals
- Health Secretary Wes Streeting privately conceded in July WhatsApp messages to Mandelson that Israel was 'committing war crimes before our eyes', while publicly rejecting criticism of Palantir's access to NHS data systems
Why it matters: The UK has effectively handed a US company with documented Israeli military ties both defence and sensitive health-data contracts, with the key defence procurement decision traceable to a meeting with an ambassador now arrested over Epstein-linked allegations. Foxglove describes the arrangement as 'vendor lock-in', and Bloomberg reported an internal Palantir email explicitly strategising how to 'hoover up' NHS rivals — raising concrete questions about procurement integrity and whether public-sector due diligence ever scrutinised the company's Gaza operations.
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