Brake calls for enforceable five-year ban on minister-to-industry moves
Tom Watson, the Labour peer and former deputy leader, has taken a full-time position at the US artificial-intelligence company Palantir as a senior vice president, the company announced. Watson will work alongside Louis Mosley, Palantir’s UK and Europe chief executive.
The role, Palantir said, will be to “deepen the social and economic value its work creates through better British public services, jobs and skills.” Palantir chief executive Alex Karp framed the appointment as the latest chapter of Watson’s “forty-year fight for better public services.” “We are fortunate to have him guide us as we help the British government to deliver for the British public,” Karp said.
Watson said he was “terrifically excited” by the new role. In his own statement he singled out two of the contracts now in dispute, declaring that he wanted to help Palantir speed up “NHS diagnosis, treatment and discharge from hospitals” and enable “our police to crack crimes and root out corruption.”
Palantir is fighting on two UK fronts. Andy Burnham’s government is under pressure to axe the company’s £330m NHS contract, and the London mayor Sadiq Khan has blocked a separate £50m deal under which Palantir’s AI would be used in Metropolitan Police investigations — a decision Palantir is challenging in court. The company already has annual UK turnover of £427m and is seeking to expand that further.
The company was co-founded by the Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel and provides AI-powered software to the Israeli military and to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a portfolio the Guardian reported has drawn political backlash against its deepening involvement in British public services. Palantir also holds a £240m contract with the UK Ministry of Defence. Watson previously served as a defence minister and as minister for digital engagement in Gordon Brown’s government.
Watson has served as a part-time adviser to Palantir since 2024, accompanying Mosley at Labour party conferences. He stepped down from parliament in 2019 and has since worked as an adviser to the gambling and music industries. Palantir said Watson had taken a leave of absence from the House of Lords and had relinquished his parliamentary pass while working for the company in London.
The move is the latest in a series of senior British political figures taking senior roles at large technology companies. Former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg spent nearly seven years working for Mark Zuckerberg at Meta. Former prime minister Rishi Sunak took jobs at Anthropic and Microsoft last year. Former chancellor George Osborne began working for OpenAI. Keir Starmer’s AI adviser, Matt Clifford, joined Anthropic this month and resigned as chair of a government science and technology research body under pressure over conflicts of interest.
Tom Brake, chief executive of the campaign group Unlock Democracy, said the pattern amounted to a transfer of public-sector knowledge to private companies. “The revolving door is proving very fruitful for big tech,” Brake said. “The only surefire way to stop tech companies benefiting from privileged information acquired by ministers or senior civil servants is to introduce an enforceable five-year ban on taking up industry posts.”