Mandelson was working to connect Palantir and Starmer behind the scenes

The UK government has released more emails from Peter Mandelson when he was ambassador to the US. Among them are two that show Mandelson was trying to create closer links between the UK government and the dubious US tech company, Palantir.

And seems Mandelson attended this event with Louis Mosley, boss of Palantir UK and his client at Global Counsel. Noteworthy as we were told that mitigations on Mandelson’s appointment included no one-on-one meetings with former clients. pic.twitter.com/q5G722DKDk

— Ethan Shone (@EJShone93) June 1, 2026

Mandelson…

Palantir is a defence contractor that’s involved in many ongoing atrocities around the world.

Its ongoing contracts includes mass surveillance, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities. Oh, and for some reason it’s also involved in the NHS, a service that’s designed to save people’s lives not to spy on/ murder them.

Palantir’s involvement in the NHS has attracted significant controversy, which is why MPs debated our partnership with the US tech abomination in April.

In 2023, Palantir walked away with a seven-year NHS contract without competition, Yanar Alkayat wrote for the Canary.

(The same kind of mates’ rates for the £240 million Ministry of Defence deal). Data handling, trust and transparency are the major concerns.

MPs speaking out included Iqbal Mohamed, who said:

If it looks evil, if it smells evil and if it behaves evil, then it is evil.

The UK government’s unseemly and secretive ties with Palantir don’t end with the newly unearthed emails. Starmer had off-the-books meetings with the murderous tech company earlier this year.

There is no public record of the Palantir briefing attended by Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson in February 2025 despite the Ministerial Code requiring Starmer to publish details of meetings with external organisations

No 10 says the event was not a meeting and did not require…

— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) April 25, 2026

Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, highlighted the following in response to the revelations:

'He was not allowed unsupervised access to former clients’

Is that why Keir Starmer had to accompany Mandelson to their secret meeting with Palantir? https://t.co/okv96wnhDk

— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) April 18, 2026

This is the problem with the revolving door between politics and corporations. No matter how many rules and regulations you introduce, these crooked operators simply contort themselves around them.

Follow the money

Speaking to the Canary, independent MP, Jeremy Corbyn, said the following about the influence of money and corporations on the UK:

The Donaldson debate today in Parliament is going to be interesting and I’ll certainly be there giving my views on his behaviour and the way in which wealth, power, money connections end up influencing decisively Labour and British politics. But the real issue is actually much wider and much deeper.

There needs to be an independent public inquiry into the influence of money, of connections, of how decisions are made and what influence they have on parties and on government. Parliament is in no position to undertake that inquiry because MPs are so involved in it all, with money being donated to campaigns, to running MPs’ offices, to supporting putative ministers and later on ministers themselves.

So we need a big clean-up on politics. That means getting the money out of it — getting the involvement out of it.

Palantir is an example of this. Palantir was introduced into the system by Mandelson and others, now deeply lodged into the civil service systems and now claiming that they are the saviors of our National Health Service. Sorry, no.

We need publicly owned, publicly run and publicly accountable data systems within our National Health Service, not owned by an American-based company called Palantir.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Canary (@thecanaryuk)

The latest Mandelson emails are interesting, but they don’t tell us much we didn’t already know about Mandelson. And importantly, they don’t tell us anything Starmer didn’t know about Mandelson when he hired him as ambassador to the US.

Featured image via Leon Neal/ Getty Images