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| Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir Technologies UK at its headquarters in London Times PHOTOGRAPHER Richard Pohle |
Oliver Wright, Policy Editor
Friday April 03 2026, 5.20pm BST, The Times
It was, by any standards, a very personal attack.
“No-one should be judged by who their parents or grandparents are,” Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader pronounced at a recent campaign event — before proceeding to do just that.
“But this is a man who is the grandson of Oswald Mosley and still insists on wearing a black shirt every single time he is on TV.”
The subject of Polanski’s vitriol was Louis Mosley who, by dint of genealogy, is the grandson of the 1930s British fascist leader.
And his “crime”? Running the UK arm of one of the world’s most successful yet controversial technology companies, which has a £300 million contract to bring NHS IT systems into the 21st century.
The radical left, like Polanski, doesn’t like it one bit.
Yet since Palantir began working with the NHS its software has joined up a myriad of individual data systems to allow health service staff to manage waiting lists, speed up discharging patients and use operating theatres more effectively.
With the programme now up and running in 123 out of 205 hospital trusts it already delivered more than 110,000 extra operations — the equivalent of three new hospitals a year.
It has also cut the number of patients waiting more than 28 days for a cancer diagnosis by 6.8 per cent and reduced delayed discharges by 15 per cent, freeing up beds for other patients.
But rather than being hailed as a great success story, Palantir and Mosley find themselves at the centre of a vicious campaign by unions, campaign groups and some MPs to pressure the government into pulling out of the contract early.
This week it emerged that Wes Streeting, the health secretary — who is intent on trying to win round the left to his putative Labour leadership bid — had asked officials to explore ways of cutting Palantir out of the NHS.
Meanwhile NHS staff are coming under pressure from unions to boycott the use of Palantir’s software because of the company’s work in the United States and Israel.
Their objection is that the same Palantir software that is helping patients get treated faster in hospital is also being used to track down illegal immigrants in Minneapolis and identify targets for missile attacks in Iran and Lebanon.
And Mosley, 43, is at the centre of the storm.
“We welcome scrutiny,” he says. “Scrutiny is essential. And in fact, the government would not be doing its job if it weren’t constantly holding its suppliers to account.
“But the acid test of this has to be, is it delivering? And in the NHS context, is it delivering for patients?
“I would invite our critics to look patients in the eye and tell them your operation is going to be delayed, it’s going to take longer to discharge you from hospital because I have a political problem with the company that’s providing the software. I think they have chosen ideology over patient safety and patient outcomes.”
The controversy all stems from Palantir’s dual role as a company that began its life working in defence and has since migrated into civilian public services.
Named after the all-seeing crystal stones from The Lord of the Rings, the company was founded in the wake of 9/11 by Peter Thiel, the controversial tech entrepreneur and Donald Trump supporter.
Its raison d’être was to use technology to help the US pursue the war against terror by developing bespoke software to gather, sift and make sense of vast amounts of data being mined from different sources and in different formats on behalf of western intelligence and defence agencies.
The CIA, the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency were all early clients and its central software programme Foundry played a key role in joining the dots of intelligence in the hunt for the fugitive al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden.
Expansion followed with a London office and the company winning key contracts with the Ministry of Defence and the intelligence services. And there it might have remained in the shadows.
But that, like so much else, changed in 2020 when Britain faced the unprecedented threat from the Covid pandemic.
Mosley was one of a number of tech executives called in desperation to an emergency meeting in Downing Street to ask for help in tackling the emerging pandemic that was then ravaging Italy.
It is a meeting that is etched on his memory.
“They had invited the whole tech industry so it ranged from companies like us through to Deliveroo that were delivering sandwiches and food,” he says.
“And the leadership of the NHS read out a list of things they needed help with which covered that full spectrum.
“But the first thing they said was we need help integrating data. And the thing they were struggling with was just keeping track of the number of Covid patients so the number of people who were turning up in hospitals with Covid, the number of hospital beds that were available across the country.
“And so I stuck my hand up and said, ‘Well, we could help with that.’”
Within 24 hours, Mosley was in the NHS HQ where, as he puts it “everyone was running around not quite sure what to do”.Ministers must ignore demands to strip Palantir of NHS contract
What Palantir was able to do — that the NHS then couldn’t — was link up all the health services IT systems to provide a “single source of truth” on the spread and scale of the pandemic.
It allowed health leaders to see on a dashboard how many patients were in each hospital with Covid, how many were in intensive care and whether those hospitals had the equipment like PPE and ventilators that they needed.
It became an absolutely critical tool in managing the pandemic — while, on the public-facing side, it was Palantir that was responsible for the famous charts that would be released daily during the Downing Street press briefings.
CV
Born: February 1983
Education: Westminster School, London; Worcester College, Oxford
Career: After leaving university, Mosley worked for a tech start-up that failed before getting a job as a research assistant for the former Conservative minister Rory Stewart in his Penrith constituency. He hoped to become a Tory MP — and was selected as a candidate before being removed by Tory central office because of his name. He also worked for Santander before joining Palantir in 2016 and rising to become the company’s executive vice chair and head of Palantir Technologies UK
Later Palantir would play another crucial role in the smooth role of the Covid vaccine programme.
The problems were manifold: some of the vaccines needed to be stored at minus 80 degrees and only had 120 hours of “fridge life” from the moment it was unfrozen. Those most at risk of developing Covid were also those least able to travel, which meant locating, equipping and staffing thousands of vaccination centres.
Each site needed to have more than 100 items including desks, chairs, needles, masks and even marker pens to black out the information on empty vials to prevent them being stolen and fraudulently sold online.
The problem Palantir solved was how to ensure each vaccination centre had the equipment and vaccines needed — and the right number of patients in the queue to get it. The fact that the vaccine rollout was achieved without controversy was in no small part down to Palantir.
For the company it was also an opportunity as the pandemic had shown what its systems could do against the most challenging of backdrops.
And in 2023 it won a contract to set up what is known as the Federated Data Platform — allowing NHS trusts to use Palantir technology to utilise the wealth of information they already had to improve productivity.
For example, the system allows operating theatre managers to see on a single screen all the patients who are due to have operations on a given day and whether they have had all the pre-op checks necessary that can lead to cancellations and delays. The system ensures that the staff who are meant to be working are working and creates an operating list based on how long procedures are likely to take. Surgeons and other staff can access the list and alter it but the single system means everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
Another use of the technology is it automatically generates discharge reports for patients from their notes without a doctor having to write it all out — but when they review it and sign it off they can see the source of all the information from the original records.
Critics might argue this all sounds relatively basic and something that the NHS could be doing without Palantir — but Mosley argues it is not as simple as it seems.
“People often underestimate how hard it is to build software,” he argues. “It’s taken us 20 years and billions of dollars of R&D to get to the product we have and that is why there isn’t currently anything else out there that works.”
So how does this fit with Palantir’s wider role working for the US and Israeli governments in defence as well as its highly-controversial contract to use data to identify illegal migrants in the United States?
Mosley points out that Palantir won the contract to work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Obama and insists that the company has always had a clear moral framework under which it operates.
“We’ve had a mission from our inception which was to defend the West,” he says. “In the West over hundreds, arguably thousands of years, we have arrived at an institutional set-up which is not perfect but is the least bad version that humanity has discovered yet as a way of organising society.
“And the mission of the company therefore is to preserve what we would see as the foundational values and institutional infrastructure of the West, so democracy, freedom, rule of law. And we see that as really sitting above politics.
“And so if you take, for example, the work we do for the armed forces, you may or may not agree with the decision to go to war.
“But I hope you would still agree that the right person to make the decision about whether we should or should not go to war is the elected civilian leadership. It’s not a military officer and it’s certainly not a self-appointed, unelected chief of a tech company.”
He goes on: “The Trump administration’s immigration policy is very controversial and therefore we as a supplier have been controversialised on the back of that.
“We would argue, and we have done so very publicly, that it is not for us to take a view on an immigration policy that has been tested at the ballot box in the way that Trump’s has been.
“Trump won a very clear mandate to pursue the immigration policy he’s pursuing. We think it is wrong for a company to, if you like, countermand the democratic decision that’s made.
“Our duty is to ensure that that policy is then delivered in the most competent, effective, secure and transparent way (under) the rule of law.”
But what if a western government won an election on a mandate to persecute a minority?
“That, I think, would be an absolute trigger red line for us,” he says. “But I don’t think we have yet got to the point where people are seriously arguing that America is no longer a democracy or that America is no longer subject to the rule of law.”
The company in the UK is staffed by predominantly young Gen Z engineers and programmers with an average age of 27 — how easy is it for them to reconcile the different parts of the company’s operations?
“There’s a strong culture of speaking up and speaking your mind,” he says. “And if you were to see inside our Slack channels, these issues are debated very vociferously. And you have a full spectrum of views.”
Mosley also argues that Palantir is just in the foothills of what it can do for the NHS and that any move to cancel the contract would be entirely self-defeating to a government that has prioritised cutting record waiting lists and improving patient care.
“So far we’ve been rolling out the software and you can think of that phase as being a bit like laying the foundations of the house. So a lot of the benefits are yet to come,” he says.
“We are now entering an inflection point where you’re going to start to see those benefits accumulate faster and so I’d be very confident that at a minimum baseline over the course of the contract will help more than 1.5 million patients in the NHS either getting discharged from hospital faster or avoiding a delay to their operation.
“It’s working, it’s working for patients, and that’s what this should be judged upon.”
And what about the personal attacks on him as a way to discredit Palantir?
Mosley has long lived with his name — and indeed it prevented him from pursuing a career in politics when he was unceremoniously ejected from the Conservative candidates list ahead of the 2017 election when a left-wing tabloid discovered who his grandfather was.
It was arguably a blessing in disguise — but it is clear that the attacks still hurt.
“My whole life people have made assumptions about me because of my surname,” he says.
“I’ve made my peace with that. But I don’t think people should be judged on the basis of beliefs their grandparents may have held.
“I want to be judged on what I have achieved, what I have done.
“Is the software working, is it delivering for patients in the NHS — not the shadow of a surname from a hundred years ago.”
Quick fire
- White shirt or black shirt? Depends on the occasion.
- Gandalf or Bilbo? Definitely Bilbo. You know, we call ourselves hobbits here. When you write an email to Palantir staff, you say, dear hobbits.
- Night Manager or Casualty? Night Manager.
- Donald Trump or Keir Starmer? I wish them both very well. I hope they both succeed in their objectives.
- Zack Polanski or Nigel Farage? Whoever has the democratic mandate is the one we’ll work for.
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