Chris Ward, Keir Starmer’s Blairite cabinet secretary and so-called transparency minister, is in the job despite two major conflicts of interest — both untenable. One has seen him use his position to protect deadly US AI firm Palantir from the normal scrutiny which a major government contractor should be subject to. The other has him deciding how much scrutiny his boss Keir Starmer will face from the public.
Palantir as a ‘strategic supplier’
The revelations come out of investigative journalism by the Canary’s Ranjan Balakumaran. Balakumaran found that Ward has not designated Palantir as a ‘strategic’ supplier, even though the scale of its annual revenue from the UK government and the key roles it is supposed to fulfil both mean it should be, under the government’s own ‘Strategic Supplier Risk Management’ [rules](file:///C:/Users/rekla/Downloads/Strategic%20Supplier%20Risk%20Management%20Policy.pdf).
These rules state that any supplier who either makes revenues of over £100m a year or are “deemed significant suppliers to government” is a “strategic supplier”:
Strategic Suppliers are those suppliers with contracts across a number of Departments whose revenue from Government according to Government data exceeds £100m per annum and/or who are deemed significant suppliers to Government in their sector. The current list of Strategic Suppliers can be found at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/content/crown-representatives.
Palantir’s contracts include (scandalously) the handling of NHS patient data and one with the Ministry of Defence (MOD) to:
modernise defence [by providing] data analytics capabilities supporting critical strategic, tactical and live operational decision making across classifications.
It’s hard to imagine anything much more ‘significant’. But in any event, the value of those two contracts — leaving aside other smaller deals — is around £120m a year, so Palantir should be strategic on both counts. But it’s not in the government’s list, which is not at the link the official document says it’s at, but instead is here.
Ranjan explains in full:
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Ward’s position must be untenable based on the Palantir protection alone. But Ward also helped cover for his boss and the disgraced Epstein-fanboy Peter Mandelson after Starmer brought Mandelson into his senior team and tried to hide it — and is now responsible for saying which documents can be released to the public:
Simon Fletcher worked as a senior adviser for Miliband, Corbyn and then Starmer, and resigned in 2021. He was still working with Starmer on Sunday 15 February that year, when he read in the Sunday Times that Starmer was taking advice from ‘the man dubbed the Prince of Darkness’.
Fletcher messaged the senior leadership team on a WhatsApp group, asking if the report was true. He did not receive a reply. He raised it again at a team meeting the next day and was told that the story had clearly come from Mandelson. It was to Fletcher’s mind a dismissive non-response.
He raised it again a few days later and received a response from Chris Ward, then a senior adviser to Starmer and today a Cabinet Office minister. ‘On Mandelson this is just him being him,’ Ward wrote. He obvs hasn’t been brought to advise — but offers it and is helpful when asked.’
Given the role the ‘transparency’ minister has in what documents the public sees that are likely to implicate his boss Keir Starmer in knowingly taking on a senior adviser known to have leaked state information to a serial child rapist working for Israel, he cannot be anywhere near such power.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
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