One answer is: the grandson of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. It’s no crime, of course, to be a descendant of a dangerous extremist, and doubtless Louis would deny all ideological connection with Oswald. It’s interesting to note, though, that when he stood as a Conservative candidate in a London council by-election in 2011, he was quoted as saying, ‘I really don’t know much about my grandfather’s career’ – a claim that takes some swallowing, and an evasion that raises a few questions. (It should be said as well that some may find Louis’s taste for wearing black shirts in his public appearances rather unnerving.)
A more relevant answer to the question is: he is the UK head Palantir Technologies Inc., the giant US data analytics company with close links to the Trump administration. With his bosses, he’s been responsible for Palantir’s rapid infiltration of the UK government’s plans for organising the data it holds on its citizens and activities.
Whether Louis harbours anti-democratic views isn’t publicly known, but the same can’t be said of his bosses, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the founders of Palantir. Both are archetypical tech moguls with very unsavoury views. Thiel, a former associate of Jeffrey Epstein, is an extreme libertarian, who once said ‘a great company is a conspiracy to change the world.’ He apparently believes that those who attempt to regulate technology – he singles out Greta Thunberg – are the ‘Antichrist’. In 2009 Karp wrote ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’ Earlier this month, in his unhinged ‘Letter to Shareholders’, he wrote, in pseudo-Nietzsche vein:
It is a divide and now perhaps more of a gulf between those who have the temerity to build, to expose themselves to others, to risk failure and defeat—and those whose sense of self is propped up by a purely oppositional identity, a loose constellation of beliefs that one is superior, morally and constitutionally, to others.
Palantir is a highly political company, committed to advancing technocratic US power. Its UK interests began over a decade ago. In its early days it had informal links with the criminal data- and election-manipulation company Cambridge Analytica. It nurtured connections with many Tory ministers and aides from at least 2008, winning government contracts in the process. At a meeting in Downing Street in March 2020 Boris Johnson invited the leaders of tech companies, including Palantir, to suggest how they should help the government in the Covid emergency. Palantir offered assistance with data analytics. Its foot was in the door, and Palantir now had the wider NHS in their sights. (The UK is unusual in having comprehensive national patient data and is therefore a juicy target for voracious data companies like Palantir.) In 2021 the chair of NHS England, David Prior, sent a message to Louis Mosley: ‘Thank you for hosting such an interesting dinner and also for the water melon cocktails! If you can see ways where you could help us structure and curate our data so that it helps us deliver better care and provides a more insightful data base for medical research do be in touch.’
In the Covid meeting Palantir had given its initial assistance ‘free’: there was no procurement process. This proved a wise move, since, just a few months later, it was handed a £23.5m contract for further work on the Covid Data Store. The decision provoked protest from many groups, who were aware of Palantir’s role in assisting military, surveillance and immigration control agencies around the world, including ICE in the US and the Israeli government and IDF. But the uproar failed to prevent the government awarding a consortium led by Palantir a much bigger contract, for £330m, to construct a Federated Data Platform, to bring together patient data from all English NHS trusts. Technically the data remain public property, but it’s not hard to see how in future the information might prove useful and profitable to Palantir, especially were the NHS to be further privatised or dismantled under a future government.
Mosley has been highly successful in areas well beyond health. Palantir has wormed its way into defence (£750m contract, September 2025), housing, the police and local government, all the while maintaining, without challenge, that it can provide the most efficient use and integration of data. The current government seems just as susceptible to Moseley’s charms as the Tory governments it succeeded. Keir Starmer met Alex Karp and others at Palantir’s showroom in Washington in February 2025, shortly after Peter Mandelson, a ‘formidable political brain’ (Louis Mosley’s phrase), became the UK’s ambassador in the US. The meeting was arranged by Global Counsel, a lobbying group established and part-owned by Mandelson (he had asked Epstein for advice when setting it up). Not long after, the UK government gave Palantir a defence contract worth £141m. There was no procurement process. In a continuation of the discredited ‘revolving door’ practice, four Ministry of Defence officials joined Palantir before the contract, and after it Louis Mosley joined the Ministry’s Industrial Joint Council, the main departmental body engaging with commercial defence companies. Palantir is now embedded in the government of the country’s defence, in what is truly, in Eisenhower’s phrase, a ‘military-industrial complex’.
Also in 2025, Mosley told the Covid inquiry that a ‘common operating system’ was needed to bring together data from all government sources’ – the implication being that Palantir would supply it. No doubt the company would have been in a good position to help bring about a national ID system, despite denials that it was interested, had not Keir Starmer made one of his famous U-turns and withdrawn the policy. Starmer’s uncritical enthusiasm for promoting AI is no doubt music to Mosley’s ears. So far Palantir holds over £500m worth of UK public contracts.
It would be wise not to accept at face value Moseley’s reassurance that ‘Palantir has zero interest in collecting, mining, or selling data. We simply provide software that helps customers better manage the information they already hold.’ And there’s certainly a danger that the tighter Palantir’s grip becomes on public data the harder future governments will find it to extricate themselves from the company’s ‘technical lock-in’.
It’s not always clear how Palantir secures its contracts. But whether or not it’s a result of fair competition, the truth seems to be that the way it succeeds is through the more complex process of establishing and nurturing long-term social contacts with ministers and other influential decision-makers. A good example is Matt Hancock, whom Palantir was already courting in 2015, years before he became responsible for health policy. In an email to colleagues in 2021, headed ‘Buying our way in …’, Mosely wrote that ‘hoovering up’ NHS contracts would ‘take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance’.
These muddy dealings between Palantir and successive governments provide an excellent case study of the unhealthily intimate relationship between those in government who are supposed to serve the public and those in amoral and unaccountable global companies whose sole aim is to extend their financial and political power. Peter Mandelson’s Epstein files have given us a rare insight into how that relationship works in practice. We can only imagine how it worked in the case of Palantir and Louis Mosley.
Footnote
Here in Wales the NHS has chosen not to employ Palantir for its future data needs. Instead, it plans to build its own system, called the National Data Resource. A businessman called Gary Howells, who says he doesn’t have links to Palantir, has denounced the move, saying that ‘patient care should not be sacrificed on the altar of political purity.’
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