Martha Dalton, co-founder of lobbying firm Lodestone, worked for Palantir through 2024 and 2025 — promoting the company's AI-powered public services software to MPs at parliamentary events. She then took six weeks' unpaid leave to embed herself in Andy Burnham's campaign for Labour leader and prime minister, handling strategic communications and rebuttals in the Makerfield byelection. She was among supporters who clapped Burnham into Downing Street in July. The timeline is tight. Lodestone's Palantir work included organising events where the company's engineers demonstrated systems designed for British public services directly to parliamentarians. Dalton subsequently worked on Lucy Powell's deputy leadership campaign in autumn 2025, a few months after Lodestone's Palantir engagement ended. Lodestone says Dalton had no contact with clients during her campaign work and took unpaid leave. Dalton's role is not an isolated thread. Labour peer Tom Watson took a full-time lobbying job with Palantir earlier this month, having previously sat on Lodestone's own strategic advisory council. Before that, Palantir employed Global Counsel, Peter Mandelson's lobbying outfit, which collapsed over Mandelson's links to Jeffrey Epstein. The pattern is consistent: Palantir cycles through Labour-adjacent influence channels. The stakes are concrete. Palantir holds a £330m NHS England contract to run the federated data platform — a national medical data system — with a break clause looming in February 2027. The company also holds a £240m Ministry of Defence contract and is pursuing a £50m Metropolitan Police AI contract that London mayor Sadiq Khan has blocked. NHS England's own chief executive, Jim Mackey, has acknowledged in parliamentary testimony that the platform's public health benefits may not be as significant as claimed. Palantir faces opposition on multiple fronts. Health workers protested at the Labour party conference in Liverpool. Labour members tabled a motion to axe the NHS deal, citing allegations of involvement in human rights breaches through technology developed for Israel's military. Palantir's UK chief Louis Mosley says the technology was used to locate hostages, not identify military targets in Gaza — a claim that sits awkwardly beside CEO Alex Karp's response to a protester alleging "Palantir kills Palestinians": "Mostly terrorists, that's true." The government's defence is procedural: robust rules exist to manage conflicts, and those rules were followed. Tom Brake of Unlock Democracy counters that candidates should follow Cabinet Office secondment guidance requiring declaration of outside interests and conflict mitigation. The distinction matters. The question is not whether rules were technically observed but whether the revolving door between a $450bn surveillance contractor and the governing party produces outcomes that serve the public. Palantir's UK executive Mosley recently dismissed critics as suffering from "Palantir derangement syndrome" — the kind of rhetorical move that treats structural concerns about democratic accountability as irrational emotion. When a company holds contracts worth over half a billion pounds across health, defence, and policing, and its lobbyists keep turning up inside the campaign machinery of the governing party, the derangement is not on the side asking questions.
