Tom Watson has turned public service into a private-sector sales post, taking a full-time senior vice-presidency at Palantir while the company fights to keep British government contracts. The Labour peer and former deputy leader will work alongside Palantir’s UK and Europe chief, Louis Mosley, from London, on leave from the House of Lords, with his parliamentary pass surrendered.
The paperwork is tidy. The arrangement is not.
Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive, called Watson’s appointment the latest chapter of his “forty-year fight for better public services.” Karp is being generous. The actual fight is over a £330 million NHS contract that Andy Burnham’s government is under pressure to scrap, and a £50 million Metropolitan Police AI deal that Sadiq Khan blocked and Palantir is now litigating to keep.
Watson says he is “terrifically excited” to help Palantir speed up “NHS diagnosis, treatment and discharge from hospitals” and enable “our police to crack crimes and root out corruption.” Read those sentences again. The former politician is now standing on the side of the lever trying to prise it loose.
Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel and supplies software to the Israeli military and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It already holds a £240 million Ministry of Defence contract, from the department Watson once served as a minister. The company posts £427 million in annual UK turnover. Watson previously served as defence minister and minister for digital engagement under Gordon Brown.
He has been a part-time Palantir adviser since 2024, accompanying Mosley to Labour party conferences. So “full-time” is mostly a label applied after the machinery was already running.
This is not a career change. It is the transfer of public-sector knowledge, procurement access and political connections into private hands, dressed up as a continuation of public service. The revolving door is not revolving. It is a sluice gate.
Watson is not the exception. He is the latest name on the one-way escalator from government office to the firms government is meant to regulate. Nick Clegg spent nearly seven years inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. Rishi Sunak took jobs at Anthropic and Microsoft last year. George Osborne began working for OpenAI. Keir Starmer’s AI adviser, Matt Clifford, joined Anthropic this month while still chairing a government science and technology research body, then resigned under pressure over conflicts of interest.
The pattern has a name: the systematic transfer of public-sector knowledge — who to call, which procurement officer to flatter, which minister to invite to which conference — into private hands that sell the knowledge back to the state.
Tom Brake, chief executive of Unlock Democracy, put the matter plainly: “The revolving door is proving very fruitful for big tech.” He called for an enforceable five-year ban on ministers and senior civil servants taking industry posts in sectors they touched in office.
Five years. Enforceable.
Not a voluntary code. Not an advisory committee. Not a cooling-off period that cools nothing because the cooling happens on the industry’s payroll. The British political class will resist such a rule because the British political class is the supply side of this market.
The same week King Charles hosted AI executives in Scotland to build consensus, Britain’s political class was visibly merging with the firms it is supposed to oversee. The hospitality is bipartisan. The lobbying is bipartisan. The patients, the policed and the public get the bill.
Karp calls it public service. Watson calls it public service. Palantir calls it public service.
The public service is the merchandise. The buyer is Palantir.