Louis Mosley, the UK and Europe boss of the data analytics giant Palantir, has told a rally of right-wing activists that a revolution is brewing, comparing it to the actions of Oliver Cromwell. Speaking at an event organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) in 2025, Mosley hailed Cromwell as a “crusader for Christ and liberty” who routed King Charles I’s royalists and declared that “a similar revolution is brewing today”. He proclaimed that globalism was in its “twilight” and name-checked the podcaster Joe Rogan and “Elon’s Doge”.
The speech, delivered with the calm intellectual confidence of a man educated at Westminster School and Oxford University, contained a central warning about what Mosley called “the Disc” – the “distributed idea suppression complex”. This, he argued, is a dissent-crushing apparatus made up of “armies of fact checkers and experts”, activists, lawyers, academics and journalists. He compared it to the Spanish Inquisition, saying it was a force more powerful than that historic institution. Mosley claimed that Brexit, Donald Trump’s election and the rise of populism were evidence of cracks in the Disc and that, with technology shifting power from the establishment to the insurgent, the moment had arrived to begin “restoring our civilisation”. He presented freedom, Christian tolerance, curiosity and open democratic debate as the doorway to a better future, and said Palantir wanted to lead society through that door.
The ‘Disc’ and its implications for free speech and democracy
Mosley’s concept of the Disc is central to his worldview and to understanding the concerns Palantir’s critics have about the company’s growing role in British public life. He describes a sprawling, interconnected network of institutions and individuals who, in his telling, suppress ideas that deviate from a mainstream liberal consensus. The army of fact-checkers, experts, campaigners, lawyers, academics and journalists he evokes are presented not as neutral arbiters but as guardians of an ideological order that stifles dissent. By invoking the Spanish Inquisition, Mosley casts the Disc as a quasi-religious orthodoxy, one that punishes heresy.
For Mosley, Brexit and Trump were tremors that showed the system was faltering. The real rupture, he argued, would come from technology. He suggested that the tools Palantir builds – advanced artificial intelligence platforms that can analyse vast quantities of data – are themselves a means to break the Disc and restore a society based on “open democratic debate”. Yet the implication is that the same power to analyse and act on information could be used to crush dissent just as easily as to liberate it. The co-founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel, has long argued that the company’s technology is neutral, a point Mosley reinforced when he said the name Palantir was taken from J.R.R. Tolkien’s all-seeing crystal stones: “They are made by the goodies – by elves – but they fall into the hands of the baddies – the wizards – and they get used for evil purposes.” It is, he argued, a constant reminder that powerful tools can be dangerous in the wrong hands but “extraordinarily good” in the right ones. Critics, however, worry that the Disc Mosley fears is merely a caricature of the democratic institutions and media that are meant to hold power to account, and that his vision of a technology-led revolution risks handing those tools to the very “baddies” he warns against.
From Tory politics to Palantir’s public sector push
Mosley, born around February 1983, is not a technologist by training. He read history at Worcester College, Oxford, graduating in 2006, and met his wife, fashion editor Nura Khan, there; they have four children. After university he worked at the Centre for Global Studies under Robert Skidelsky, who had written a biography of Mosley’s grandfather, the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. He then spent time in strategy at Santander UK and entered Conservative politics, serving as a research assistant to MP Rory Stewart and as a councillor in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea from 2011 to 2014. In 2017 he was shortlisted as a Conservative parliamentary candidate but his candidacy was withdrawn over party concerns about his family name – his grandfather led the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and his father is Oswald Alexander Mosley. Mosley has said he has “made peace” with people making assumptions because of his surname but believes individuals should not be judged by their grandparents’ beliefs.
He joined Palantir in 2016 and rose to become executive vice president, leading its now 700-strong UK and Europe operation from a chic exposed-brick headquarters in Soho, London. His early success came from pitching directly to government ministers. When MP Michael Gove was in charge of Brexit planning, Mosley impressed him with his intellectual curiosity and secured a contract. Later, when Rory Stewart was prisons minister, Palantir offered to manage prisoner data on a no-cost basis. When the pandemic struck, Boris Johnson’s government called on Mosley and other tech executives for help. Mosley offered to track infections and hospital beds, and subsequently enabled the vaccine rollout. By November 2023, Palantir had signed a seven-year, £330 million deal with NHS England to provide its Foundry system as the basis for the Federated Data Platform (FDP), designed to centralise data across up to 240 NHS organisations. The contract includes provisions preventing Palantir from commercialising or marketing NHS data, but the company retains intellectual property rights in Foundry.
Beyond health, Palantir has secured major defence and police contracts. In December 2022, the Ministry of Defence signed an enterprise agreement worth £75 million over three years to support its shift toward data-driven forces, and a separate £240 million contract for deploying military AI systems. Police forces including Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire are piloting a project named ‘Nectar’ to create a unified data view, while Leicestershire Police signed a contract worth over £800,000 for an intelligence platform. The Metropolitan Police is in talks with Palantir about expanding its use of AI software for criminal investigations; it already supplies experimental tools to identify rogue officers. However, many police forces have refused to disclose details of their contracts, citing national security and law enforcement exemptions in response to Freedom of Information requests.
Mosley’s father-in-law’s legacy has also attracted attention. The Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, recently pointed out that Mosley’s habit of wearing dark tops mirrored the “blackshirt” garb of his grandfather’s followers. Libby Bateman, a former Conservative county councillor who knew Mosley when he worked in Cumbria, dismissed the comparison, saying it was because black suited his fair complexion and that “everyone likes to pick on Louis because of who his grandad was.”
Growing public concern and calls to cut ties
Despite Mosley’s vigorous defence of Palantir across X (formerly Twitter), podcasts and BBC News sofas, public antipathy toward the company is deepening. Polling carried out for the campaigning organisation 38 Degrees found that more than two-thirds of the UK public are concerned about Palantir’s growing number of public contracts, and 40% distrust it to not access NHS patient data, despite the company’s repeated insistence that it cannot and will not do so.
The mood darkened last month after Palantir’s US office posted a manifesto extolling the benefits of American power and implying that some cultures are inferior to others, which MPs described as “the ramblings of a super villain”. Earlier, in January, one of Palantir’s clients, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), shot dead two people. Palantir’s long-standing relationship with ICE – including a $30 million contract awarded in 2025 to develop an AI platform called “ImmigrationOS” for enforcement prioritisation – has fuelled criticism, as has its technology’s role in conflicts in Gaza and Iran. The company’s reputation has also been damaged by its association with former minister Peter Mandelson, whose lobbying firm Global Counsel worked for Palantir until its collapse amid scrutiny of Mandelson’s links to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Michael Gove, who saw Palantir up close in government, said the tech company had become “a bogey in which some of our broader fears about tech and some of our broader concerns about particular political developments are focused”. While he believes that “used with wisdom, Palantir was and is capable of providing huge boons to government in delivering services effectively”, others dispute this. Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP, voiced the deepest fear: “when our data does get into the hands of the bad actors who may want to use this for ill, not good. We need only look across the Atlantic to see how integrated data has informed the ICE unit to target migrant communities, and this is the same technology which holds our NHS data and coordinates our defence information.”
Last month, cross-party MPs called for the NHS contract to be cancelled, citing “shameful” and “dreadful” practices and fears about patient data security. Mosley hit back, accusing critics of having “chosen ideology over patient safety” and claiming that Palantir’s software had helped deliver 110,000 additional operations and reduce discharge delays. Tom Bartlett, who until five weeks ago was the deputy director of data engineering at NHS England, praised the Palantir-enabled system for dramatically accelerating data analysis requests that used to take months, and said the “huge negativity” around the company was creating adoption hesitancy that would harm patients. But some NHS trusts have reported that Palantir’s pilot programmes did not meet their needs, with several suspended or paused.
Mosley has embraced the foundational idea of Palantir, launched after 9/11 to help the US win the war on terror. The company’s name, drawn from Tolkien, serves as a constant reminder that powerful tools can be used for good or ill. His job, increasingly, is to persuade the public that he and Palantir are among the goodies – a task made harder every time the company’s US office publishes a manifesto, its technology is linked to a deportation operation, or its UK boss compares a coming revolution to the rise of Oliver Cromwell.
