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Boris Johnson’s former Chief of Staff Dominic Cummings lobbied Government officials to hand Covid ‘Test and Trace’ tech contracts to a firm run by a Trump-supporting billionaire, after he held a secret meeting with its founder, alongside the Prime Minister.
A recent Guardian investigation revealed that Cummings and Johnson held an undeclared meeting with Palantir founder Peter Thiel in August 2019. According to the report, the meeting was marked “private in a log of Johnson’s activities that day and was not subsequently disclosed on the government’s public log of meetings”.
Now new emails released to Byline Times, following a freedom of information request, reveal the true extent of Dominic Cummings’ subsequent involvement in lobbying senior officials to hand over huge Covid contracts to Thiel’s company, and another one run by his fellow Trump-supporting billionaire Larry Ellison.
In September 2020, Cummings sent an email to Dido Harding – the Conservative peer appointed by former PM Boris Johnson to oversee the previous Government’s £37 billion, flagship Test and Trace Programme.
In an email carrying the subject header “testing fundamentals”, Cummings instructed Harding to ignore Cabinet Office procedures, claiming that if the programme needed to spend “100m quid” procuring goods to support the Coving Testing rollout then they shouldn’t “worry about the CABOFF [Cabinet Office] paperwork”. Crucially, the former advisor also insisted that officials should have “NO MINISTERS ON THESE CALLS”.
Cummings demanded that officials should bypass the NHS when building the software to power the Test and Trace programme and instead look towards controversial US tech firm Palantir as well as IT firm Oracle, owned by Larry Ellison.
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Russell Scott
Cummings said: “We need a cloud solution for the huge data needs – forget NHSX doing it, we need to get someone like Palantir or Oracle (Larry Ellison is offering free) to do this, but we need someone who really knows what theyre talking about to navigate this.
“Marc Warner/Faculty handled Palantir for the NHS in Feb-May – this was NOT done by NHSx and if left to NHS wd never have happened… this is incredibly urgent as the data infrastructure for millions of tests per day is highly non-trivial and we wont be able to do it in a fortnight, we need to get it going NOW for it to work in November”.
In the next paragraph of the email Cummings claimed that the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, who had been CC’d in the message, had advised officials “that all normal processes are binned for testing” and that they could “hire exactly who they want from inside or outside civil service without need to wait even an hour for approval” before claiming that officials will be “absolved from legal blame if JRs [judicial reviews]” against procurement processes arose in the future.
Both Oracle and Palantir went on to secure covid contracts from Johnson’s Government during the pandemic.
In 2023, The US firm landed the £330m Federated Data Platform contract from the NHS to Palantir.
As Byline Times previously reported Thiel had likened the UK’s commitment to the NHS to “Stockholm syndrome” and backed a complete overhaul of the institution. In a clip still available online, Thiel said of the health service: “Rip the whole thing from the ground and start over”.
Speaking at a Q&A event at the Oxford Union, the Thiel spoke of the need to fix the health service with “market mechanisms”.
The first step to fixing the Health Service, Thiel said, was to break the public away from the idea that it is “the most wonderf…