The Leadership and Deputy Leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson was so full of promise. Neither of them is blameless for what happened instead, but Paul Knaggs writes:
There is a particular kind of British political career that ends not in disgrace, nor in quiet retirement, but in a press release. Tom Watson’s arrived on Wednesday, when Palantir Technologies announced that the former deputy leader of the Labour Party would become the senior vice president of its UK operations. The announcement was warm, corporate and entirely free of irony. Watson, it said, would help “deepen the social and economic value” that Palantir’s software creates through “better British public services, jobs and skills.” Watson himself was “terrifically excited.” He wanted, he said, to help the company speed up “NHS diagnosis, treatment and discharge from hospitals” and enable “our police to crack crimes and root out corruption.”
Root out corruption. Tom Watson, the man who spent two decades in the smoke and mirrors of Westminster factionalism, is now paid to talk about rooting out corruption on behalf of a company co-founded by Peter Thiel, the Trump-donating billionaire whose software already sits inside the NHS, the Ministry of Defence and eleven police forces, and whose American parent has built tools for Donald Trump’s immigration enforcers and for the Israeli military’s operations in Gaza. If that sentence reads like satire, it is not. It is simply Wednesday’s news, and it deserves to be read slowly.
Nine years ago, Len McCluskey, then general secretary of Unite and once Watson’s flatmate, wrote something about him that has aged with unusual precision. Amid the Labour civil war of 2017, as Watson worked to unseat Jeremy Corbyn’s allies inside the party’s biggest union, McCluskey wrote: “there is another world in our movement, alas. A world of skulduggery, smears and secret plots. That is where you will find Tom Watson. When Labour has needed loyalty he has been sharpening his knife looking for a back to stab.” It reads today less like an insult than a prophecy. Watson has indeed found his world. It simply now has a share price.
WHAT PALANTIR ACTUALLY SELLS
To understand why this appointment matters beyond the usual churn of former ministers into lucrative sinecures, you have to understand what Palantir does. It does not sell software in the way a normal company sells software. It sells the capacity to fuse every database an institution holds, patient records, policing intelligence, defence logistics, into a single, searchable, governable whole. Its own executives have described the model, with a candour that ought to alarm anyone who has ever filled in an NHS form, as “land and expand”: get in cheaply, build dependency, then extract. Peter Thiel co-founded the company in 2003 with early backing from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s own venture capital arm, and has since joked, when asked whether Palantir was a front for the agency, that the arrangement runs the other way round. It is the kind of joke that stops being funny the moment the company is managing your local hospital’s waiting list.
That is precisely what Palantir is doing. Its Federated Data Platform, a £330 million contract with NHS England signed under the last Conservative government, is now the subject of a review by ministers over whether to trigger a break clause due in February 2027. Its Metropolitan Police contract, worth £50 million, was blocked outright in May by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, which found that the force had failed to run a proper procurement process and had engaged with only one supplier throughout. Palantir’s response was not to walk away. It sued. Sadiq Khan is now a defendant in the High Court, his private texts and emails ordered disclosed, because he did the one thing an elected official is supposed to do when a contractor’s ethics trouble him: he said no. That a foreign technology firm can drag a democratically elected mayor through discovery for exercising oversight tells you rather more about where power actually sits than any amount of ministerial reassurance about “sovereignty.”
Green MP Siân Berry, whose Brighton Pavilion constituents will one day have their own medical records running through this architecture, has put it more plainly than most parliamentarians dare: Palantir, she says, “has openly stated their intention to exploit and subjugate the British public for profit and power.” Berry and her colleagues have written to the Cabinet Secretary demanding an independent inquiry into the firm’s UK contracts and, tellingly, into the involvement of Peter Mandelson. Mandelson is no longer ambassador. He was sacked last September after further revelations about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, a friendship that documents released by the US Department of Justice this year show ran rather deeper than the “regrets ever having been introduced” his office once offered. Those files include emails showing Epstein wired £10,000 to Mandelson’s husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, in 2009, two months after Epstein’s release from prison, on top of $75,000 in payments to accounts connected to the two of them in 2003 and 2004, while Mandelson sat in Gordon Brown’s cabinet.
Other emails from the same year appear to show Mandelson, then business secretary, telling Epstein he was “trying hard” to water down a proposed tax on bankers’ bonuses, and passing him detail on the government’s response to the Eurozone crisis. Virginia Giuffre told the Mail on Sunday in 2011 that she had been introduced to Mandelson at a dinner party inside the same Manhattan townhouse from which Epstein ran his trafficking operation, and assumed the two men were “in business together.” None of this places Mandelson inside Epstein’s crimes, and no court has found that it does. What it establishes is that a serving Cabinet minister took money from a convicted sex offender and used his office to do that man favours, and that the Metropolitan Police have since arrested him on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
Mandelson resigned from the Labour Party altogether in February, having previously failed his own Cabinet Office security vetting for the Washington job, a failure the Foreign Office simply overrode. It was one thread among several that helped unravel Keir Starmer’s premiership by June and put Andy Burnham in Downing Street by July. Watson’s new employer, in other words, is not an incidental presence at the edges of Labour’s recent convulsions. It runs through the middle of them, by way of Global Counsel, the lobbying firm Mandelson founded, in which he retained a substantial stake even as ambassador and which counted Palantir among its clients, and by way of Mandelson himself, who stood as one of Watson’s supporting peers when he was introduced to the House of Lords in 2022.
THE DUTY DEFENCE
That introduction did not happen easily, and the manner of its happening tells you everything about the moral accounting Westminster applies to its own. Watson was first put forward for a peerage by Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, in the dissolution honours list drawn up as Corbyn left office. It was blocked. The House of Lords Appointments Commission and Downing Street rejected Watson alongside John Bercow and Corbyn’s former chief of staff Karie Murphy, citing propriety concerns. Lord Cormack, a Conservative peer, put the objection to Watson bluntly at the time: “one who has abused his place in one House of Parliament should not be admitted to another.”
The abuse in question was well documented. In 2012, acting on the claims of a fantasist who went by the name “Nick,” Watson wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions demanding the reopening of a rape investigation into the former home secretary Leon Brittan that police had already closed for lack of evidence. Brittan died of cancer in January 2015 without ever being told he faced no charges. Watson, after his death, quoted “Nick” describing Brittan as “as close to evil as a human being could get.” “Nick” was Carl Beech, later exposed as a convicted paedophile who was jailed for eighteen years for fabricating claims of rape, torture and murder against Brittan and against the former military chief Lord Bramall and the former MP Harvey Proctor, whose homes were raided by police on the strength of his lies. Watson had described himself throughout as acting from “duty.”
Watson’s peerage eventually came anyway, nominated this time by Keir Starmer in 2022. Lord Lamont, the former Conservative chancellor, called it “a stain” on the House of Lords and “an absolute disgrace.” In his maiden speech, Watson apologised “unreservedly” to Lady Brittan for his role in the affair. It was a rare moment of candour from a man whose career has otherwise run on the conviction that loyalty and duty are whatever he needs them to be at the time.
THE CORBYN YEARS, REVISITED
The same instinct was on display, more nakedly, in the summer of 2019. As Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby underwent chemotherapy for cancer, a BBC Panorama documentary alleging antisemitism within the party’s machinery prompted Watson and allies in the press to attack her personally. Speaking to a crowd at the Durham Miners’ Gala, McCluskey did not mince his response: “you should be fucking well ashamed of yourselves,” he told Watson and his media allies, calling the attack on a woman receiving cancer treatment “a disgrace.” Corbyn, addressing the same crowd, called the documentary’s framing a “predetermined position” riddled with “many, many inaccuracies.”
Two years earlier, during the Unite leadership contest that prompted McCluskey’s “skulduggery” remark, Watson had thrown his weight behind McCluskey’s rival, Gerard Coyne, in what critics on the left characterised as an attempt to use the union’s internal democracy as a proxy battlefield against Corbyn. None of this makes Watson uniquely wicked among his contemporaries. It makes him remarkably consistent. The pattern, from the Brittan affair through the Unite war to Palantir, is always the same: present the manoeuvre as principle, and let someone else absorb the damage.
It would be too easy, and too generous to Palantir, to treat this simply as a story about one man’s character. Watson is not unique. Since leaving Parliament in 2019 he has advised the gambling industry, taking a retainer from Flutter Entertainment, the owner of Paddy Power, despite having called problem gambling “a public health emergency” as a sitting MP and criticised the “predatory” tactics of the very firms he went on to serve. He chaired UK Music. He has been, in short, a professional occupant of the revolving door for years before Palantir came calling. What has changed is the stakes.
An investigation by the outlet The Nerve found that Palantir has hired at least 32 senior former UK officials and 37 mid-ranking staff, including four peers, among them Watson, who sits on the company’s advisory board and chairs the advisory council of Lodestone Communications, the lobbying firm Palantir retained in 2024. Steve Goodrich of Transparency International UK called the pattern an “acute risk” of former officials trading on privileged access. Susan Hawley of Spotlight on Corruption was more direct still, describing the strategy as a means “to get privileged insights into how government runs and gain commercial advantage.” Palantir denies any such strategy exists.
The Guardian situates Watson within a wider procession: Nick Clegg at Meta, Rishi Sunak advising both Anthropic and Microsoft, George Osborne at OpenAI, and Keir Starmer’s own AI adviser Matt Clifford, who joined Anthropic within days of Watson’s own appointment. Tom Brake of Unlock Democracy has called for the only remedy with any teeth: an enforceable five-year ban on ministers and senior officials taking jobs with firms they once regulated or contracted with. Without it, he notes, “the revolving door is proving very fruitful for big tech.”
There is a case to be made for the other side, and it should be made fairly. Palantir’s defenders point to genuinely improved NHS logistics, to police investigations accelerated, to the argument that a full-time public affairs job for Watson brings more transparency than the shadowy part-time advisory role he has held since 2024, not less. Louis Mosley, the company’s chief executive in the UK and, in one of history’s stranger inheritances, the grandson of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, insists Watson brings “a deep understanding of public policy” to a British operation that already employs more than one in six of Palantir’s global workforce. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has made “British jobs” a defining promise of his young government, and Palantir has been quick to fold Watson’s appointment into that language.
None of this is presented as trivial, and some of it may even be true. But efficiency is not the same as ownership, and speed is not the same as consent. The question was never whether Palantir’s software works. It is who controls the ontology once it is built, who audits the algorithm once the contract is signed, and who is answerable when a company whose founder jokes about being indistinguishable from the CIA holds the medical records of sixty million people who never had a vote on the matter. He has spent his whole career making the indefensible feel inevitable to the people around him, right up until the moment it collapsed and someone else was left holding the wreckage.
The NHS was built, in Nye Bevan’s phrase, so that no one would have to fear the bill when they fell ill. It was never built to be a proving ground for Silicon Valley’s data ambitions, and the police were never meant to run their intelligence through a platform whose sister contracts, in another country, help track immigrants for deportation and help fight wars whose legality is itself disputed in courts and parliaments around the world.
Watson’s job, stripped of its press-release language, is to make that arrangement feel inevitable. He has spent his whole career making the indefensible feel inevitable to the people around him, right up until the moment it collapsed and someone else was left holding the wreckage. Leon Brittan’s widow is still waiting on an apology that came seven years too late for her husband to hear it. Jennie Formby fought her cancer while a colleague and his allies in the press turned her illness into a weapon. Sadiq Khan is now watching his private messages combed through by lawyers for saying no to a contract his own procurement office found unlawful.
What Britain needs is not another inquiry that reports in eighteen months and changes nothing, though the one Green MPs have demanded into Palantir’s contracts and Mandelson’s role in securing them would be a start. It needs Tom Brake’s five-year ban made law, with teeth. It needs a public register of every former minister and senior official now drawing a salary from a company they once regulated, updated in real time, not buried in the toothless filings of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments. And it needs a Labour government, of all governments, to remember that public data is not a resource to be leased to the highest bidder in the name of jobs and efficiency, but a public good held in trust, the same way the health service itself was meant to be held in trust
Andy Burnham inherited a party that talks endlessly about serving working people while its most senior figures queue up to serve whoever pays best. He has the chance, however briefly, to choose differently. On the evidence of his first significant test, he has not yet taken it. Len McCluskey wrote nine years ago that skulduggery, smears and secret plots were the world Tom Watson was born to inhabit. He was wrong about only one thing. He thought it was a criticism. Watson has just proved it was a job description.
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