Investigations

Revealed: Britain's contracts with Palantir hit £1bn

Newly surfaced disclosures reveal the government has spent or agreed to spend at least £992m with Peter Thiel’s controversial AI company – as pressure mounts on Andy Burnham to block them. Max Colbert reports

News

Sleepless in Slough: the residents who fear for their failing health in Europe’s data centre capital

With an estimated 40 facilities packed tightly together in the town, local people say their quality of life is being ruined by strange and unsettling noise pollution. Brenna Spain reports

News

‘Captured by crypto’: Fears grow over Farage’s threat to Bank of England independence – and the economy

Reform's biggest donor holds a direct stake in an industry the Bank regulates. A crossbench peer is calling for powers to block a Trump-style influence grab at the top of the institution, writes Ian Tucker

Reform UK

ICE’s tech enablers are already embedded in the British state

Palantir, Anduril, Cellebrite and others supply America’s deportation machine. They also hold UK contracts with the Home Office, MoD and police – offering surveillance capabilities that a Reform government would inherit. Max Colbert reports

Tech

Follow the money: the Farage funding timeline

As the revelations around donations to Reform and its leader multiply, we’re keeping the receipts. Carole Cadwalladr introduces a master timeline of our investigation into Farage’s biggest funder, cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne, and argues that Farage is a symptom, not a cause, of forces reshaping politics across the world

Reform UK

Liz Truss, dark money and the gen-Z Catholics: who’s behind CPAC in the UK?

The British debut of Maga’s favourite conference last week was widely seen as a joke. But a Nerve investigation reveals its young organisers are part of a web of culture-war connections – from the US Christian right to Viktor Orbán's influence network. Alice McCool reports

Investigations

Farage, the money launderer and me: a decade of denial

The Reform leader’s relationship with the UK media has enabled him to operate with impunity for years. This past fortnight, that impunity finally appeared to be coming to an end. Carole Cadwalladr, who’s tracked him for a decade, reports on why

Reform UK

As Farage is investigated ... did Boris Johnson also fail to disclose a gift from Christopher Harborne?

Leaked documents appear to reveal a previously undeclared trip made by the former PM with the crypto and defence billionaire to the heart of war-torn Ukraine. Report by Carole Cadwalladr and Charlie Young

The Harborne Receipts

Crypto, peerages, or political self-sacrifice – why did Farage gift Boris the 2019 election?

Part two of the Harborne Receipts, the Nerve’s investigation into the billionaire's influence on UK politics brings us to the 2019 election – which took the UK out of Europe while dumping 300 Brexit party candidates, leaving a wound on the far right still raw today. By Carole Cadwalladr and Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Reform UK

Billionaire Christopher Harborne donated millions to Farage and Johnson. Then the pro-crypto announcements began. Is there a connection?

The crypto investor’s £5m gift to Reform’s leader coincided with the party’s new-found advocacy for digital assets – part of a pattern of significant political donations that also included £1m to the former Tory prime minister. Report by Charlie Young and Lucia Osborne-Crowley

The Harborne Receipts

New fears over spread of Palantir’s influence after ‘Big Brother’ Met police project extended

The programme, designed to expose officer misconduct, was due to expire last month. The Nerve has established that it was extended to today, May 15, with no indication what happens next. Officers fear they will be under long-term surveillance, while it’s also emerged the project could be rolled out to more staff. Report by Max Colbert and Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Palantir

Contact? Source? Or friend? The curious connection between Michael Wolff and Jeffrey Epstein

The New York media insider has 100 hours of interviews with the dead sex offender. But the Epstein files also reveal an intimate 20-year history of emails between the two men that seems far more than journalistic, writes Ellie Leonard

News

I made Labour Together angry. Here’s how it feels when a political party targets you

Paul Holden had been reporting on the thinktank at the heart of Keir Starmer’s rise to power when he was told he was the subject of a national security investigation. This is the twisting story of what happened next

Investigations

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

The AI company holds £670m in UK government contracts. It has also hired dozens of senior officials from the departments awarding them – raising what transparency experts call an 'acute' corruption risk, write Charlie Young, Carole Cadwalladr and Ian Tucker

Palantir

Is Palantir in your pension? UK institutions have over £5bn invested in US tech corporation

Research reveals size of investment by UK organisations – including some of Britain’s biggest retirement providers – in Silicon Valley’s most controversial technology company. Carole Cadwalladr and Ian Tucker report

Palantir

Revealed: 80% of Reform’s funding comes from Tory donors

The majority of the money behind Nigel Farage’s movement was being supplied by Conservative interests even before the defection of so many high-profile figures from the party – to the alarm of former Reform faithfuls, writes Charlie Young

Investigations

The billionaires' eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science

Edge - Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon - was sold to me as a gathering of the world's finest minds, writes Virginia Heffernan. The files reveal it was something far darker: a decades-long project that cloaked eugenics, race science and sexual misconduct in Ivy League respectability

Tech

What’s happening in America is technofascism. It could happen here

Peter Thiel's data surveillance company Palantir is powering Trump's ICE operation in the US. Carole Cadwalladr argues that the UK will be next

Palantir

Revealed: Palantir deals with UK state total at least £670m – including £15m contract with nuclear weapons agency

EXCLUSIVE Nerve investigation finds Trump ally Peter Thiel's surveillance firm has won at least 34 contracts, including management services for Britain's nuclear deterrent, with MPs warning of 'gaping vulnerability' as US president threatens Nato allies. By Carole Cadwalladr, Charlie Young and Max Colbert

Palantir

Trump in plain sight: how a new US security document has changed the world

The crises over Venezuela and Greenland are not accidental – they are part of the White House’s stated vision for a new world order run by the ‘great powers’, writes analyst and former diplomat Arthur Snell

Investigations

'A solid line-up of truth-tellers': Grok bot provides climate denial content to 'user' it believes to be anti-science

EXCLUSIVE: New Global Witness report shows Elon Musk's bot and ChatGPT giving inconsistent responses to differing 'personas' designed by researchers, with Grok providing false information and climate conspiracies in line with user's apparent beliefs

Environment

Rumours, reports and a row on Facebook: how I followed the Russian trail to Nathan Gill

Five years before the disgraced ex-Reform politician was sentenced, political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov had encountered his name during his research. Here he recounts how what at first seemed like a footnote grew into a scandal

Investigations

Reform UK and Russian bribes: a Nathan Gill timeline

As Reform’s former leader in Wales is sentenced to ten and a half years for taking bribes from a pro-Russian actor, here's a chronology of his actions and the wider context of Putin, Ukraine and Brexit

Reform UK

An absent MP. A Russian traitor in Reform. I go to Clacton in search of Nigel Farage

On the trail of the elusive Reform leader, John Sweeney films a report in his struggling constituency – where even the prospect of Putin undermining British politics doesn’t raise many eyebrows

Investigations

"It's democracy, but not as we know it": John Sweeney on Reform, Russia & the result in Caerphilly

The Nerve’s Reform correspondent went to Caerphilly on polling day to catch the mood of a bellwether by-election: would Reform UK defeat Labour as the stats were suggesting? And where on earth was their candidate Llŷr Powell, former colleague of Russian puppet Nathan Gill? Watch John's report to find out...

Reform UK