The corridor was full of 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, “the same revolution is brewing right this moment”, stated the UK and Europe boss of Palantir. Globalism’s “twilight” was upon us, he stated 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 no typical contractor. Lately 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 lower its ties with the firm that was co-founded by the Trump-backing tech billionaire Peter Thiel. It means Mosley has grow to be a lightning rod for public worry of a US tech takeover of the British state. It has fallen to him to combat again. Nearly each day his boyish options may be seen defending Palantir towards its critics on X.com, on podcasts and on BBC Information sofas. However who is 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 could possibly be anticipated of a person educated at Westminster college and the College of Oxford. Nevertheless it additionally contained a whiff of conspiracy.
Be careful for the Disc, Mosley warned – the dissent-crushing “distributed thought suppression advanced” consisting of “armies of reality checkers and consultants”, activists, legal professionals, teachers and journalists. Right here was a drive extra highly effective than the Spanish inquisition. Brexit, Trump and the rise of populism had been indicators of cracks in the Disc and now, with know-how shifting energy from institution to rebel, the second was coming to begin “restoring our civilisation”.
Freedom, Christian tolerance, curiosity, and open democratic debate had been the doorway to a greater future and Palantir wished to lead society by means of that door, stated Mosley.
Mosley is an necessary determine at Palantir. He is not educated as a technologist, however labored in Tory politics, together with spells as an assistant to Rory Stewart and as a councillor in 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 kids. He is extra seemingly to be seen studying biographies – Aneurin Bevan and Stalin have been current topics – than coding manuals.
Associates say he is “straightforward to like”, delicate and clever. He had a spell working on technique at the financial institution Santander, before being employed by Palantir in 2016, rising to lead its now 700-strong UK and Europe operation in an elegant uncovered brick headquarters in London’s Soho. He had success pitching immediately to authorities ministers and securing offers to set up Palantir’s AI-powered evaluation instruments as an working system to make sense of mountains of public information.
His title has been a burden, a minimum of in some methods. He got here shut to turning into a Conservative parliamentary candidate in 2017, however his candidacy was axed by a celebration afraid of affiliation together with his grandfather Sir Oswald Mosley, the chief of the British Union of Fascists in the Thirties.
On-line, the place a lot of the debate about Palantir performs out, Mosley’s behavior of carrying darkish tops has raised eyebrows. The Inexperienced occasion chief, Zack Polanski, lately identified the parallel to the “blackshirt” garb of Oswald Mosley’s followers. Nevertheless it was no nod to fascism, stated 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 honest complexion. She sympathised as a result of “everybody likes to choose on Louis due to who his grandad was”.
In 2019, he gained a contract with the authorities to assist with Brexit planning after pitching immediately to Michael Gove, who was impressed by Mosley’s mental curiosity. When Stewart was prisons minister, Palantir pitched its software program to handle prisoner information, initially on a no-cost foundation and, when the pandemic struck, Boris Johnson’s authorities known as in Mosley and different tech executives for assist. Mosley supplied to monitor 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 present its Foundry system to allow the creation of a federated information platform.
For a few years this key contract confronted low-level opposition from some medical doctors 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 shoppers, ICE taking pictures lifeless two folks in January plus the position of its know-how in wars in Gaza and Iran. The corporate’s status has additionally been shaded additionally by its affiliation with Peter Mandelson, whose World Counsel lobbying firm labored for Palantir till its collapse over the peer’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
“Palantir has grow to be a bogey by which a few of our broader fears about tech and a few of our broader issues about specific political developments are centered,” stated Gove.
Final month, cross-party MPs known as for the NHS contract to be cancelled, describing Palantir as “shameful” and “dreadful” and citing fears about the safety of affected person information and public belief. Mosley repeatedly hit again towards critics who “have chosen ideology over affected person security” and claimed the firm’s software program had helped ship 110,000 extra operations and lower 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 in the world … [between] an American versus a European imaginative and prescient of tech”.
On one facet are the US accelerationists who consider that solely by making use of the most superior AIs to entire authorities methods will western democracy keep away from being eclipsed by totalitarianism. In Europe folks need to pedal slower, set up guardrails and worry tech corporations gaining an excessive amount of energy might usher in one other form 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 information, regardless of the firm repeatedly insisting it can’t and can not accomplish that.
What Gove noticed of the tech firm in authorities led him to consider that “used with knowledge, Palantir was and is able to offering enormous boons to authorities in delivering providers successfully”. However others, together with some NHS medical doctors, dispute this and worry its advantages are overplayed.
Tom Bartlett, who, till 5 weeks in the past was the deputy director of knowledge engineering at NHS England, has praised the Palantir-enabled NHS system for dramatically accelerating information evaluation requests affecting frontline care that used to take months.
“To have gotten this know-how up and working is unbelievable,” he stated, stressing he was talking independently. He stated the “enormous negativity” round the firm was creating adoption hesitancy that will influence sufferers’ outcomes.
Mosley has embraced the foundational thought of Palantir, launched after 9/11 to assist the US win the struggle 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 arms of the baddies – the wizards – they usually get used for evil functions”.
It is, stated Mosley, a relentless reminder that “you’re constructing a really, very highly effective software, and in the fallacious arms, very highly effective instruments may be extraordinarily harmful. However in the proper arms, they can be utilized to do terribly good issues.”
This troubles Palantir’s critics akin to the Labour MP Rachael Maskell.
“The most important worry of all is when our information does get into the arms of the dangerous actors who might want to use this for sick, not good,” she stated. “We’d like solely look throughout the Atlantic to see how built-in information has knowledgeable the ICE unit to goal migrant communities, and this is the similar know-how which holds our NHS information and coordinates our defence information.”
Palantir’s drawback now is a rising variety of folks worrying about the baddies. Mosley’s job is more and more to persuade the public he, and Palantir, are not amongst them.
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