Martha Dalton, the recent Palantir lobbyist Andy Burnham's team worked closely with on his way to power, played a senior role in helping him become prime minister, campaigning for him in the Makerfield byelection that returned him to parliament. Lodestone, the firm she co-founded, worked for Palantir in 2024 and 2025. Her campaign role emerged while the company fights to retain its £330m contract with NHS England.

Dalton's role in the Burnham campaign

Dalton, a recent Palantir lobbyist, played a senior role in helping Andy Burnham become prime minister. She campaigned for him in the Makerfield byelection that secured his return to parliament, and wrote on LinkedIn that it had been "an absolute honour to work on Andy Burnham's campaign to become Labour leader and prime minister".

• •Worked closely with Burnham's team on strategic communications and rebuttals
• •Took six weeks' unpaid leave from Lodestone to spend time in Makerfield supporting on strategic comms and rebuttals
• •Was among the supporters who clapped Burnham into Downing Street in July

Lodestone's work for Palantir

Lodestone, which Dalton co-founded, worked for Palantir in 2024 and 2025. Its work included promoting the company's software at events in parliament, where Palantir engineers demonstrated AI-powered systems for use in British public services to MPs. Dalton later worked on the autumn 2025 deputy leadership campaign of the current education secretary, Lucy Powell — a role that began a few months after Lodestone stopped working for Palantir.

• •A Palantir spokesperson said Lodestone worked on a range of projects explaining how the company's software delivers public services, including parliamentary events where MPs question engineers on data privacy and security
• •A Lodestone spokesperson said its Palantir projects were all focused on helping the company explain its technology to those who hold it to account
• •The same spokesperson said Dalton had no contact with clients during her leave and volunteered because she believes Burnham is the best person to lead Labour and the country

The £330m NHS contract under pressure

Dalton's role emerged while Palantir fights to retain its £330m contract with NHS England to run the federated data platform, the national medical data system. Burnham's government is under pressure to scrap the deal, and campaigners are angry about Palantir's work for the Israeli military in Gaza and Donald Trump's ICE immigration crackdown. Jim Mackey, NHS England's chief executive, has acknowledged concerns that the benefits to public health may fall short of what has been claimed.

Health workers who want ministers to scrap Palantir's NHS deal protested at the Labour party conference in Liverpool on Tuesday. A motion tabled earlier by Labour members demanded the deal be axed; it claimed Palantir faces numerous allegations of involvement in serious breaches of human rights and cited the company's development of technology for Israel's military.

Louis Mosley, Palantir's executive vice-president for the UK and Europe, said its technology was "used to locate hostages but not to identify military targets in Gaza" — a statement that appears to contradict what the firm's chief executive, Alex Karp, said last year. Karp was challenged by a protester over an allegation that Palantir kills Palestinians in Gaza, and replied that those killed were mostly terrorists.

Mosley recently said people who do not recognise the technology's impact on cutting treatment waiting times and speeding up hospital discharges were suffering from "Palantir derangement syndrome". The next fixed point is a break clause in the NHS England contract, which looms in February 2027.

Palantir's other contracts and other Labour links

Palantir is a US tech company valued at $450bn. It works for the US and UK militaries and was co-founded by the Trump-supporting tech billionaire Peter Thiel. It holds a £240m contract with the Ministry of Defence and has been selling its services to other police forces and councils. Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, is in a legal battle with the company after blocking the Metropolitan police from awarding it a £50m contract to supply AI tools to assist criminal investigations.

• •Labour peer Tom Watson took a full-time job lobbying for Palantir earlier this month
• •Watson had previously spent a period as a member of Lodestone's "strategic advisory council"
• •Palantir previously hired Peter Mandelson's lobbying firm Global Counsel, before it collapsed over the former Labour trade secretary's links to Jeffrey Epstein

Tom Brake, chief executive of the campaign group Unlock Democracy, said candidates should observe Cabinet Office advice on secondments before adding volunteers or secondees to their campaign teams. That advice requires secondees to declare relevant outside interests, for potential conflicts to be explored and appropriate mitigations put in place. A Labour spokesperson said robust rules and procedures exist to manage any potential conflicts, whether in government or in campaigns, and that those were followed.