Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Recent Palantir lobbyist worked on Burnham's campaign as the £330m NHS contract nears a break clause
Martha Dalton, whose firm worked for Palantir in 2024 and 2025, had a senior role in Andy Burnham's campaign as Palantir fights to keep a £330m NHS deal. Ministers will weigh that link, and others like it, when the contract reaches its February 2027 break clause.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Dalton took six weeks' unpaid leave from Lodestone to work on strategic communications and rebuttals in the Makerfield byelection that returned Burnham to parliament.
- Lodestone's Palantir work included events in parliament where Palantir engineers demonstrated AI systems for British public services to MPs.
- Labour peer Tom Watson took a full-time job lobbying for Palantir this month, after sitting on Lodestone's strategic advisory council.
- Labour members tabled a motion calling for the NHS deal to be axed, and health workers protested against it at the party conference in Liverpool.
- NHS England chief executive Jim Mackey has acknowledged concerns that the data platform's public-health benefits may be smaller than claimed.
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Why it matters
- decision Ministers who keep the contract at the break clause will have to defend it against a list of Labour figures tied to Palantir's lobbying, as well as on its disputed benefits.
- exposure Suppliers whose staff or agencies help ruling-party campaigns now face conflict questions even where, as Lodestone says, the person had no client contact during the campaign.
- precedent If campaigns adopted Unlock Democracy's proposal, a lobbyist joining a candidate's team would first have to declare outside interests, so supplier staff who volunteer would trigger a disclosure.
- constraint Each Labour-linked hire Palantir makes narrows the room ministers have to back the firm without the decision looking like a favour to its friends.
Palantir has a plain commercial reason to stay close to Labour. The Guardian describes the $450bn US company's UK fortunes as intertwined with the Labour government [1] [20]. Alongside the NHS England platform, it holds a £240m Ministry of Defence contract and sells to police forces and councils [18]. Add the £330m NHS deal [6] and those two named contracts total £570m [1]. Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, is in a legal battle with Palantir after he blocked a £50m Metropolitan police contract for AI tools to assist criminal investigations [17].
Burnham's government is under pressure to scrap the NHS deal over Palantir's work for the Israeli military in Gaza and for the ICE immigration crackdown [7], and the break clause falls in February 2027 [16]. With the contract contested, Palantir's closeness to the governing party becomes part of the case against renewal. I'd expect ministers taking that decision to face questions about every Labour figure who has worked for the firm or its agencies. Dalton's record goes beyond Burnham. She worked on the autumn 2025 deputy leadership campaign of Lucy Powell, now education secretary, a few months after Lodestone stopped working for Palantir [5]. Palantir previously employed Global Counsel, Peter Mandelson's lobbying firm, before it collapsed over the former Labour trade secretary's links to Jeffrey Epstein [10].
Dalton wrote on LinkedIn that it had been "an absolute honour to work on Andy Burnham's campaign to become Labour leader and prime minister" [11]. Lodestone says the work was personal. "She had no contact with clients during that time and did so because she believes Andy Burnham is the best person to lead the Labour party and the country," a spokesperson said [13]. The firm described its Palantir projects as "all focused on helping them to explain their technology to those who rightly hold them to account" [14]. The Guardian's report does not show Dalton had any part in decisions on the NHS contract.
That defence covers her conduct during the campaign, but the governance question arises earlier, when a lobbyist joins a candidate's team. Tom Brake, chief executive of the campaign group Unlock Democracy, said candidates should follow Cabinet Office advice on secondments before adding volunteers or secondees to their teams [21]. "This requires successful secondees to declare relevant outside interests, clarify that potential conflicts will be explored and ensure appropriate mitigations are put in place," he said [22].
For public-sector suppliers, the trade-off is between access and exposure. Advisers with party ties get a company in front of ministers and MPs. The same ties give opponents material when the contract comes up for decision. A supplier's board has to decide this quarter whether staff and retained agencies declare campaign work before they start it. Palantir's executives have answered critics bluntly. Louis Mosley, its executive vice-president for the UK and Europe, said people who do not recognise its technology's effect on treatment waiting times and hospital discharges were suffering from "Palantir derangement syndrome" [19].
What to watch
- Whether ministers exercise or let pass the February 2027 break clause in Palantir's NHS England federated data platform contract.
- Whether Labour or the Cabinet Office extends secondment disclosure rules to campaign volunteers, as Unlock Democracy wants.
- The outcome of Sadiq Khan's legal battle with Palantir over the blocked £50m Metropolitan police contract.