British MPs who criticised Palantir in parliament received “intimidating” letters from the US spytech firm, Novara Media can reveal. The MPs say it won’t stop them from continuing to hold Palantir to account.
Page F124From§Eachthe evening edition — 22 October 2026
Palantir let new ICE hires in before vetting, sent lawyers in after an MP's speech.
As it ran on the front
Louis Mosley, the UK chief executive of Palantir Technologies, sent letters this month to a handful of British MPs who had criticized the company from the floor of Parliament. Novara Media, which obtained the letters, reports they read as intimidating. The recipients included former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Labour and Cooperative MP Rachael Maskell. Both say the letters will not stop them from continuing to hold Palantir to account.
The federal government has not published the privacy assessment the law requires for a system like ELITE — a filing that was due, and is still sitting wherever filings sit when nobody above them asks where it went.…
…(cont) Line that up next to the letters, and the ledger reads the same company two ways in two months. One column: outside counsel, dispatched to a sitting MP over a floor speech. The other column: a hiring pipeline that let people see restricted immigration data before the background check cleared it. Both are Palantir's columns. Only one of them appears to have been audited by anyone with the standing to ask.
Nobody at Palantir has said what the September gap cost ICE, or what it cost to find out. Nobody has said what the October letters cost either. The company is not required to say, and as far as the public record shows, nobody with subpoena power has asked. That is not proof of a connection between the two line items. It is proof that neither one carries a public price tag, which is its own kind of finding, hon.
What the MPs say is simpler than any of that: the letters do not change what they plan to say next. Parliament has a floor, the floor has a record, and the record stays open to anyone who wants to stand up and name a contractor by name, intimidating letters or not. Whether that stays true depends on how many more letters go out, and how many members decide the floor isn't worth it. For now the count is two names, one company, and zero changes in what either of them plans to say.
“Here's the trick: they can't be bothered to check who they hand restricted immigration data to, but they've got a lawyer on retainer for the first backbencher who says their name out loud in Parliament. That's not a company, that's a priority list, and you're not on it. When the vetting is optional and the lawyering isn't, you already know whose floor speech they're actually scared of.”
“Look, a company has every right to correct the record when a member of Parliament gets the facts wrong — that's not intimidation, that's just, uh, robust communication. The hiring thing is a separate HR matter being handled internally, it has nothing to do with — did I just connect those two stories myself? Forget I said that.”
The receipts
· ICE Gave New Hires Access to Restricted Info on Palantir App Before They Passed Background Checks from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.