Can’t Persuade Voters? Tom Watson’s New Palantir Job Shows You Can Just Buy Their Democracy

Back in the halcyon days of Corbynism, I spent a lot of time thinking about Tom Watson. The then-deputy leader of the Labour party was the right’s man on the inside; either a noble fighter in service of the moderate cause, or a committed wrecker, who weaponised antisemitism allegations to undermine his own party. He resigned from the post, and stepped down from the House of Commons, just one month before the 2019 general election.

What’s he been up to these days, I hear you ask? Well, six years after being elevated to the House of Lords by Keir Starmer, further congratulations are in order. Watson’s just been appointed as Palantir’s newest senior vice-president, working closely with Louis Mosley (grandson of Oswald, and the second-worst Mitford sister). A hero of the working man, a Labour titan, through and through.

Watson’s new job is more of a promotion than a big move: the Baron of Wyre Forest had been a member of Palantir’s advisory board since 2024. According to the company – named, reassuringly, after the evil and corrupting magic seeing stones from The Lord of the Rings – Watson’s role will be to increase the “social and economic value” of its work through public services, jobs and skills. Translation: this former minister will help grease our way to the government teat.

The assistance of an ex-Westminster big dog couldn’t come a moment too soon for Palantir. The company is facing pressure on PM Andy Burnham to cancel its £330m NHS contract, and is in a legal dispute with London mayor Sadiq Khan over his blocking of a £50m Metropolitan police AI contract. Palantir’s involvement with US immigration enforcement (ICE) and work with the Israel Defence Force during the genocide has made the tech giant a flashpoint for protesters.

What’s more, polling shows that the overwhelming majority of Brits are in favour of regulating AI more tightly. There’s a growing sense that AI has more risks than benefits, and more than three-quarters of people cite the use of personal data without consent as a negative impact of the technology on their lives.

The task for Watson, then, is to convince the prime minister and his cabinet to ignore campaigners and voters alike, and hand over lucrative government contracts to Palantir with as little fuss as possible. If Palantir was after a man who’s had practice going to bat for morally-compromised causes, they could have chosen no better: since stepping down as an MP, Tom Watson went onto advise Flutter Entertainment, which owns Paddy Power, Betfair and SkyBet. Steel-trap memories may recall Watson once having been an ardent voice for betting regulation in the House of Commons.

To be fair to Watson, he’s hardly the first man through the revolving door. Nick Clegg, another former deputy prime minister, headed for the sunshine of Silicon Valley after leaving government, taking a job with Meta (then-Facebook). Ex-PM Rishi Sunak has taken roles with Anthropic and Microsoft since leaving government, and former chancellor George Osborne leapt into bed with OpenAI.

And hey, maybe these guys are just fabulous workers: diligent, industrious, indefatigable. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s not their character that’s valuable, so much as their contact books. The point of hiring politicians, from a tech-oligarch’s point of view, is to wear away at political resistance. Why persuade voters, when you can just buy democracy out from under them?