The U.K. Is Falling for Palantir’s Salesmanship

Palantir's Showmanship Finds Willing U.K. Marks

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Argument:

The U.K. Is Falling for Palantir’s Salesmanship

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Argument

An expert’s point of view on a current event.

The U.K. Is Falling for Palantir’s Salesmanship

Fantasy, not practicality, is driving bad deals.

By **Gareth Watkins**, a writer based in Manchester, UK.

!A view of the Palantir building is seen during the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 20, 2026.

*A view of the Palantir building is seen during the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 20, 2026.*

A view of the Palantir building is seen during the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 20, 2026. Laurent Hou/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

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August 26, 2026, 11:44 AM

In February 2025, then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer traveled to Washington to meet U.S. President Donald Trump for the first time since the latter reentered office. They talked tariffs, Ukraine, and an invitation to visit King Charles. That was routine: The prime minister’s next stop was more unusual. Starmer headed to the showroom of software giant Palantir Technologies for a meeting arranged by Peter Mandelson, then the U.K. ambassador to the United States, whose now-shuttered lobbying firm Global Counsel counted Palantir as a client worth more than 30,000 pounds (about $40,900) a month. Footage shows Starmer flanked by American military personnel and Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp, as he inspects an attack drone.

Civil society groups such as the Good Law Project and Foxglove had questions about the visit, and about the 240 million pound ($327.1 million) contract that Palantir was awarded shortly afterward. I have a different set of questions: Why does an enterprise data-integration company have a showroom? Why does that showroom contain weaponized drone platforms and screens relaying satellite feeds? What, exactly, was the prime minister being shown, and what was he meant to feel?

In February 2025, then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer traveled to Washington to meet U.S. President Donald Trump for the first time since the latter reentered office. They talked tariffs, Ukraine, and an invitation to visit King Charles. That was routine: The prime minister’s next stop was more unusual. Starmer headed to the showroom of software giant Palantir Technologies for a meeting arranged by Peter Mandelson, then the U.K. ambassador to the United States, whose now-shuttered lobbying firm Global Counsel counted Palantir as a client worth more than 30,000 pounds (about $40,900) a month. Footage shows Starmer flanked by American military personnel and Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp, as he inspects an attack drone.

Civil society groups such as the Good Law Project and Foxglove had questions about the visit, and about the 240 million pound ($327.1 million) contract that Palantir was awarded shortly afterward. I have a different set of questions: Why does an enterprise data-integration company have a showroom? Why does that showroom contain weaponized drone platforms and screens relaying satellite feeds? What, exactly, was the prime minister being shown, and what was he meant to feel?

Unlike its competitors, Palantir places a military and intelligence aesthetic front and center, and not just when selling to military clients. It self-consciously evokes the visual grammar of post-9/11 spy, war, and superhero films: dark “tactical” interfaces, dense webs of link-analysis graphs, and an “AI-defined” truck for the U.S. Army. Its London office has blacked-out windows and no signage; visitors reportedly sign nondisclosure agreements simply to enter. The showroom exists to immerse the visitor in that world of elite operators and threat feeds rather than the quotidian reality of data visualization. It’s theater, and so is the product.

This approach has paid off extremely well for Palantir in the U.K. In the *London Review of Books*, Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin describe a company with an unprecedented level of political access and fanatical institutional backing that is nonetheless quite ordinary, and often ineffective. Palantir began targeting Britain aggressively from 2019, with particular focus on the National Health Service (NHS). Its opening gambit came during the pandemic, when it supplied its services for 1 pound for four months.

That foothold became a much larger contract to build the NHS’s Federated Data Platform, which draws the data held in various trusts and general practitioners’ surgeries into a single system to power the apps that clinicians use. Yet 52 of the 139 trusts that the NHS classifies as “live” did not use a single Federated Data Platform app in the year preceding this June. Internal briefings call the interface “slow and clunky,” with queries that once took 30 seconds taking four or five minutes; one daily user described waiting 20 minutes for a dashboard to load, only for the system to crash. Further inquiry has met with delays and obfuscation, including a communications agency’s attempt to pay influencers to soothe public anxiety about the firm.

That refusal to act like a normal company extends to its contracts. Palantir creates structures that make it impossible to leave without punishment: Were the NHS to end the Federated Data Platform tomorrow, its staff would lose almost everything built on it, because most of the work lives only inside