The corridor was filled with rightwing radicals when Louis Mosley heralded a coming revolution. Simply as Oliver Cromwell – that “crusader for Christ and liberty” – routed King Charles I’s royalists, “an identical revolution is brewing at the moment”, mentioned the UK and Europe boss of Palantir. Globalism’s “twilight” was upon us, he mentioned in a speech dotted with admiring mentions of the podcaster Joe Rogan and “Elon’s Doge”.
It was not a typical peroration for an enormous UK authorities contractor with greater than £600m in offers with the NHS, the Ministry of Defence and police. However Palantir, the world’s most controversial tech firm, is not any typical contractor. In recent times it has gained agency footholds throughout Britain’s public sector whereas appalling critics with its management’s rightwing rhetoric and its work for the US and Israeli militaries and Donald Trump’s ICE immigration crackdown.
Calls are rising for Keir Starmer’s authorities to chop its ties with the corporate that was co-founded by the Trump-backing tech billionaire Peter Thiel. It means Mosley has turn into a lightning rod for public worry of a US tech takeover of the British state. It has fallen to him to battle again. Nearly every day his boyish options might be seen defending Palantir towards its critics on X.com, on podcasts and on BBC Information sofas. However who’s Mosley and what does he assume?
Mosley’s Cromwell speech, which was delivered in 2025, got here at a rally organised by the Alliance for Accountable Citizenship, a convening organisation of the west-must-win libertarian Christian proper. It was additionally addressed by Jordan Peterson, Thiel and Nigel Farage. Mosley delivered it with the calm, mental self-confidence that might be anticipated of a person educated at Westminster college and the College of Oxford. However it additionally contained a whiff of conspiracy.
Be careful for the Disc, Mosley warned – the dissent-crushing “distributed concept suppression advanced” consisting of “armies of reality checkers and specialists”, activists, attorneys, teachers and journalists. Right here was a power extra highly effective than the Spanish inquisition. Brexit, Trump and the rise of populism had been indicators of cracks within the Disc and now, with know-how shifting energy from institution to rebel, the second was coming to start out “restoring our civilisation”.
Freedom, Christian tolerance, curiosity, and open democratic debate had been the doorway to a greater future and Palantir needed to guide society by means of that door, mentioned Mosley.
Mosley is a crucial determine at Palantir. He’s not skilled as a technologist, however labored in Tory politics, together with spells as an assistant to Rory Stewart and as a councillor within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. He learn historical past at Oxford the place he met his spouse, Nura Khan, a style editor, with whom he has 4 youngsters. He’s extra prone to be seen studying biographies – Aneurin Bevan and Stalin have been current topics – than coding manuals.
Associates say he’s “simple to love”, delicate and clever. He had a spell engaged on technique on the financial institution Santander, earlier than being employed by Palantir in 2016, rising to guide its now 700-strong UK and Europe operation in a classy uncovered brick headquarters in London’s Soho. He had success pitching on to authorities ministers and securing offers to put in Palantir’s AI-powered evaluation instruments as an working system to make sense of mountains of public knowledge.
His title has been a burden, a minimum of in some methods. He got here near turning into a Conservative parliamentary candidate in 2017, however his candidacy was axed by a celebration scared of affiliation together with his grandfather Sir Oswald Mosley, the chief of the British Union of Fascists within the Nineteen Thirties.
On-line, the place a lot of the controversy about Palantir performs out, Mosley’s behavior of carrying darkish tops has raised eyebrows. The Inexperienced celebration chief, Zack Polanski, just lately identified the parallel to the “blackshirt” garb of Oswald Mosley’s followers. However it was no nod to fascism, mentioned Libby Bateman, a former Conservative county councillor who knew Louis Mosley when he labored with Stewart in Cumbria. It was extra as a result of black suited his truthful complexion. She sympathised as a result of “everybody likes to choose on Louis due to who his grandad was”.
In 2019, he received a contract with the federal government to assist with Brexit planning after pitching on to Michael Gove, who was impressed by Mosley’s mental curiosity. When Stewart was prisons minister, Palantir pitched its software program to handle prisoner knowledge, initially on a no-cost foundation and, when the pandemic struck, Boris Johnson’s authorities referred to as in Mosley and different tech executives for assist. Mosley provided to trace infections and hospital beds and later enabled the vaccine rollout. By 2023, Palantir had signed a seven-year £330m take care of NHS England to offer its Foundry system to allow the creation of a federated knowledge platform.
For a few years this key contract confronted low-level opposition from some docs and campaigners, with others discovering the know-how helpful. However in current months Mosley has confronted a darkening anti-Palantir temper, fuelled by considered one of its purchasers, ICE taking pictures lifeless two folks in January plus the position of its know-how in wars in Gaza and Iran. The corporate’s fame has additionally been shaded additionally by its affiliation with Peter Mandelson, whose International Counsel lobbying firm labored for Palantir till its collapse over the peer’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
“Palantir has turn into a bogey through which a few of our broader fears about tech and a few of our broader issues about specific political developments are targeted,” mentioned Gove.
Final month, cross-party MPs referred to as for the NHS contract to be cancelled, describing Palantir as “shameful” and “dreadful” and citing fears concerning the safety of affected person knowledge and public belief. Mosley repeatedly hit again towards critics who “have chosen ideology over affected person security” and claimed the corporate’s software program had helped ship 110,000 extra operations and minimize discharge delays. However public antipathy was infected once more final month when Palantir’s US workplace posted a manifesto extolling the advantages of American energy and implying some cultures had been inferior to others.
One other affiliate described Mosley as straddling “the frontline between rival concepts of tech and its place on the planet … [between] an American versus a European imaginative and prescient of tech”.
On one facet are the US accelerationists who imagine that solely by making use of essentially the most superior AIs to entire authorities programs will western democracy keep away from being eclipsed by totalitarianism. In Europe folks wish to pedal slower, set up guardrails and worry tech firms gaining an excessive amount of energy may usher in one other type of tyranny.
Polling for the campaigning organisation 38 Levels shared with the Guardian suggests Mosley faces an uphill battle. Greater than two-thirds of the UK public are involved at Palantir’s rising variety of public contracts and 40% mistrust it to not entry NHS affected person knowledge, regardless of the corporate repeatedly insisting it can not and won’t accomplish that.
What Gove noticed of the tech firm in authorities led him to imagine that “used with knowledge, Palantir was and is able to offering big boons to authorities in delivering companies successfully”. However others, together with some NHS docs, dispute this and worry its advantages are overplayed.
Tom Bartlett, who, till 5 weeks in the past was the deputy director of information engineering at NHS England, has praised the Palantir-enabled NHS system for dramatically accelerating knowledge evaluation requests affecting frontline care that used to take months.
“To have gotten this know-how up and working is unbelievable,” he mentioned, stressing he was talking independently. He mentioned the “big negativity” across the firm was creating adoption hesitancy that will impression sufferers’ outcomes.
Mosley has embraced the foundational concept of Palantir, launched after 9/11 to assist the US win the warfare on terror. It was named after the all-seeing crystal stones from The Lord of the Rings, which, as Mosley later defined, “are made by the goodies – by elves – however they fall into the fingers of the baddies – the wizards – and so they get used for evil functions”.
It’s, mentioned Mosley, a relentless reminder that “you’re constructing a really, very highly effective device, and within the fallacious fingers, very highly effective instruments might be extraordinarily harmful. However in the correct fingers, they can be utilized to do terribly good issues.”
This troubles Palantir’s critics such because the Labour MP Rachael Maskell.
“The most important worry of all is when our knowledge does get into the fingers of the dangerous actors who might wish to use this for sick, not good,” she mentioned. “We’d like solely look throughout the Atlantic to see how built-in knowledge has knowledgeable the ICE unit to focus on migrant communities, and this is identical know-how which holds our NHS knowledge and coordinates our defence info.”
Palantir’s drawback now could be a rising variety of folks worrying concerning the baddies. Mosley’s job is more and more to steer the general public he, and Palantir, usually are not amongst them.
