The Palantir pipeline: how Peter Thiel's surveillance firm hired more than 30 senior UK officials

Palantir has recruited  32 UK government and public sector officials including leaders of AI strategy from both the Ministry of Defence and the NHS, a new investigation by the Nerve reveals. 

The practice has exposed the UK to an “acute risk” of corruption, transparency experts say, with the law woefully inadequate to guard against the multiple conflict of interests.

The Nerve has discovered a “revolving door” that has led to dozens of highly experienced UK government officials, former ministers, intelligence service chiefs and members of the House of Lords taking up key roles in the controversial Silicon Valley surveillance tech company co-founded by Peter Thiel, the libertarian friend and ally of Donald Trump.

The investigation reveals:

Palantir is coming under increasing pressure as public unease about the company’s leadership and operations in other countries grows. Its surveillance tech has been central to ICE’s immigration operations in America and in the US military’s operation in Iran. Its handling of NHS data, in particular, has come under scrutiny, with the Liberal Democrat and Green party leaders, Ed Davey and Zack Polanski, both demanding it withdraw from its £330m contract with the health service.

But the Nerve’s new findings reveal the hidden levers of power that Palantir has accessed in the UK government, the Silicon Valley company’s second biggest client. 

Since 2012, Palantir has hired personnel from across the top tiers of the Ministry of Defence, Department of Health and Social Care, NHS, Home Office, Foreign Office, UK Health Security Agency, Crown Commercial Service, secret service and Downing Street.

It has also hired from mid-ranking roles in various government departments, the NHS and from the civil service – including from the UK Health Security Agency, NHS Digital and the Office for Nuclear Regulation. According to Bloomberg reporter Katrina Manson in her new book Project Maven, this is a carefully designed strategy: Palantir deliberately targets employees who have had hands-on experience of its software and who understand the culture of its biggest customers. 

As Manson recently told the Tech Policy podcast: “Every defence contractor has a revolving door, but their revolving door looked a little different from some of the traditional big defence contractors like Lockheed Martin. They tend to be hiring from the middle ranks.”

Steve Goodrich, director of research at Transparency International UK, said there was inevitably a risk of abuse of confidential information by the former public sector officials. 

He said: “Poor controls on the revolving door between government and the private sector mean there's an acute risk of former officials abusing privileged information and contacts entrusted to them for the benefit of their new employers.” 

Earlier this year, a spotlight was shone on Lord Mandelson’s relationship with Palantir after Keir Starmer sacked him over his failure to disclose the extent of his links to Jeffrey Epstein. Peter Mandelson’s company, Global Counsel, was still representing Palantir when Mandelson was appointed UK ambassador to Washington, where he was able to use his position to introduce Keir Starmer to key Palantir personnel on a trip to visit Trump.

But Mandelson is not the only member of the Lords who has been in Palantir’s pay. A total of four peers have worked for the company, including Tom Watson, a former deputy leader of the Labour party, and John Woodcock, a former special adviser to Gordon Brown. Watson sits on Palantir’s advisory board. He is also chair of the advisory council for Lodestone Communications, the lobbying firm Palantir hired in 2024.

Another peer, Nicola Blackwood – a former chair of the Commons science and technology select committee, the parliamentary body whose remit would include scrutinising Palantir – has also consulted for the company through Mandelson’s Global Counsel. 

But this is just to scratch the surface. Laurence Lee is senior adviser to Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, on “geostrategy”. Lee was previously second permanent secretary to the Ministry of Defence, prior to his Palantir appointment in 2024, and played a key role in the MoD’s entire AI strategy, helping write its “Defence Artificial Intelligence Strategy” in 2022.

Records reveal he also met Palantir at least nine times between 2021 and 2023. 

Susan Hawley, executive director at Spotlight on Corruption, told the Nerve: “There is no doubt that companies do this [hire public officials] to get privileged insights into how government runs and gain commercial advantage from doing so.”

Some key appointments are scrutinised by Acoba – the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments – but Elizabeth David-Barrett, director of the Centre for the Study of Corruption at the University of Sussex, describes the system as wholly inadequate.

She said: “Regulation, which is very weak anyway, tends to assume that the risk comes after movement. In fact, it's the relationship that is in itself risky. 

“Once they've gone from public to private, does the company benefit from the knowledge that they bring with them – or is the job being used as a reward for giving them some favourable treatment while they were still in public office? I think the regulatory system is really quite inadequate, not fully understanding the nature of the risks.”

As previously revealed by the Nerve, Palantir’s known UK government contracts amount to at least £670m across more than 10 departments between 2012 and 2025, with the lion’s share of revenue coming from MoD and NHS contracts. The new investigation reveals more than two-thirds of Palantir’s government hires come from those two same areas: defence and health.

Palantir’s hiring spree on key NHS officials includes Indra Joshi, who had been NHS England’s head of AI, an absolutely critical role in terms of Palantir’s involvement with UK’s health infrastructure. Joshi led the formation of the NHS artificial intelligence lab and oversaw the creation of a data dashboard during the pandemic. She was recruited to be Palantir’s director of health, research and AI in 2022 and worked there until 2024. 

Paul Howells was the head of NHS Wales’s national data programme until he was recruited to be Palantir’s director of health and care from 2021 to 2025. And Matthew Swindells was, until recently, a joint chair of four NHS trusts, having previously been deputy CEO of NHS England and a principal adviser to a prime minister. 

He was still the joint chair of those NHS trusts when Global Counsel recruited him as an adviser in 2019, and only stood down last month after the Financial Times revealed he had urged GPs to put practice data on Palantir’s platforms.

David-Barrett said that Palantir’s hires could lay the ground for a type of corruption which may be impossible to act against or even detect. “In theory, if someone who's in public office gives some kind of privilege to a private sector company in return for getting a lucrative job with them afterwards, potentially that could fall under bribery. But it would be very difficult to prove.”

Hawley says the seeming lack of propriety around these appointments feeds into the public’s cynicism about politics. “Unless the rules are much tougher, with longer lobbying bans for those who have held the most senior offices of state, and are more robustly enforced, it will continue to be difficult to rebuild public trust in politicians.”

There is no suggestion of criminal wrongdoing on the part of any individual named in this article. 

A spokesman for Palantir said: “We were supplied 32 names spanning around 15 years – a period in which thousands of people have worked for Palantir in the UK.

“Of those, 14 no longer work for, or with, us, some of whom stopped as long as five years ago. Six are ex-armed forces veterans whose public sector experience involved serving and protecting their country.

“Not only do we entirely reject claims of an alleged ‘revolving door’ strategy, but we also believe it is inappropriate to include veterans in a report alleging such a strategy. Aside from the immense value of their experience, there is rightly an undertaking by government and society to ensure they are afforded the opportunity to build a career outside the armed forces when the time is right for them. Characterising this as part of a ‘revolving door strategy’ does them, and all veterans, a disservice.”