The newsroom backdoor
In mid-2026, the Guardian published the results of a four-month undercover investigation into CT Group, the lobbying and communications firm co-founded by Lynton Crosby — the strategist once nicknamed the "master of the dark arts" for his work advising David Cameron and Boris Johnson. An undercover reporter, posing as a freelance journalist, was approached by CT Group's Gavin Stollar and offered payment to pitch a piece critical of the Building Safety Regulator, the body set up after the Grenfell Tower fire to improve housing safety. In later meetings, other CT Group staff reportedly went further, discussing arrangements in which the firm would want editorial control over a piece written on behalf of another client — first semi-hypothetically over lunch, then more explicitly in legal correspondence — all without the journalist's editors being told CT Group was involved. When the reporter raised discomfort with the arrangement, staff reportedly suggested he wasn't the only freelance writer with a similar arrangement with the firm. CT Group has said it will not comment on the specific allegations and maintains it did not pay or engage the undercover reporter to do anything.
It's not the firm's first brush with this accusation. Reporting by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project found that Steward Health Care, the US company that took over Maltese hospitals, paid CT Group and other private intelligence contractors to plant fabricated bribery stories about Chris Fearne — Malta's deputy prime minister at the time — while Fearne was scrutinising the hospitals deal. The mechanism there wasn't just promoting a client. It was discrediting the person doing oversight.
It's a well-worn playbook. Bell Pottinger ran a comparable campaign for South Africa's Gupta family, inventing the "white monopoly capital" narrative and building fake grassroots social accounts to redirect scrutiny away from the family's dealings with state-owned firms. Decades earlier, lobbyist Jack Abramoff paid the syndicated columnist Doug Bandow for more than a dozen op-eds favourable to his clients, without disclosure — a scandal that ended Bandow's career once it surfaced. The through-line across all of it: what's actually being purchased isn't the article, it's the appearance of independence that makes the article credible.
Precedent for hire
The same manufactured-consensus logic shows up in courts, not just newsrooms. US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has spent years documenting what he calls "the Scheme" — a network of dark-money-funded litigation groups that, in his words, find or manufacture "plaintiffs of convenience," shop for favourable judges (notoriously in single-judge federal divisions in Texas), and then coordinate waves of amicus briefs from affiliated groups to create the impression of broad, organic legal consensus around a position. It's the same manufactured-appearance trick as CT Group's alleged newsroom placements, aimed at the judiciary instead of the press. It's also, it should be said, a Democratic senator's characterisation of a Republican-aligned legal infrastructure — the groups he names (the Federalist Society, Judicial Crisis Network, Koch-linked networks) dispute the "scheme" framing, even where the underlying tactics are documented.
Britain has its own, more mundane version of gaming a court process, and a case from this July shows both the abuse and the correction working in the same file. Amar Lodhia, a "legal consultant" operating through JSC Chambers, brought a defamation claim against people who'd criticised his litigation activity — and Mr Justice Linden found he'd fabricated documents, submitted false witness statements (some verified with a statement of truth), doctored a court order, and lied about it under further sworn statements. Linden referred him to the Attorney General for possible contempt proceedings and to the Bar Standards Board, alongside a fresh three-year civil restraint order — his second. The chambers supervising him was referred too, for what the judge called an unconvincing account of what "supervision" actually meant in practice. It's a useful corrective to any temptation to see the system as uniformly rigged: this is what happens when a judge actually looks closely. The catch is that it depends on someone looking closely, every time.
Manufacturing the case for privatisation
A parallel operation runs through UK health policy. The "NHS is failing, patient choice and private competition will fix it" argument has been advanced for years by a small cluster of think tanks — the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, Policy Exchange, the TaxPayers' Alliance — all of which score the lowest possible rating for funding transparency from the Who Funds You? campaign. The IEA specifically received a $155,000 grant from the US-based Templeton Foundation explicitly earmarked to research alternatives to public healthcare systems, publishing NHS-privatisation arguments without disclosing that funding link. It has separately taken money from British American Tobacco and BP.
None of this proves the privatisation argument is wrong on the merits — NHS waiting lists are a real and well-documented problem. What's manufactured isn't the backlog; it's the appearance that the "private choice" solution comes from disinterested policy experts rather than funded advocacy.
This is precisely the shape of PEP/EDD risk, extended from a person to the network around them: a funding or advisory relationship looks entirely benign at the point it's formed, and the corrosion is only legible years later, once the money, the advocacy, the access and the eventual outcome can be traced as one line. Kim covers this alongside the existing PEP fundamentals and elite-regulatory-capture framework material.
The contracts no one's allowed to read
Where the opinion-shaping ends, the procurement begins — and this is where the pattern becomes hardest to write off as coincidence. Palantir Technologies, the US data-analytics firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, won the £330m NHS Federated Data Platform contract in November 2023. When it was published, 417 of the contract's 586 pages were blacked out. It took a legal challenge from the Good Law Project to force a partial re-release, and roughly 100 pages — covering how patient data is pseudonymised before entering the platform — remain withheld to this day.
On the defence side, Palantir signed a £750m, five-year AI contract with the Ministry of Defence in September 2025, followed by a separate £240.6m no-bid contract that December — awarded shortly after the company had hired its fourth former senior MOD official that year. An investigation by Carole Cadwalladr's outlet The Nerve found Palantir holds at least 34 UK government contracts worth upwards of £670m (a figure later found to exceed £900m) across more than ten departments, including an undisclosed £15m "cloud support" contract with the Atomic Weapons Establishment that doesn't appear on the government's official Contracts Finder site.
The ambassador, the Prime Minister and the billionaire
Palantir's path through Whitehall runs directly through Peter Mandelson. Before becoming UK Ambassador to the US in early 2025, Mandelson co-founded and held a 24% stake in the lobbying firm Global Counsel — whose client list included Palantir. That connection was reportedly missing from his ambassadorial vetting. Just over a fortnight into the job, on 27 February 2025 — the same day as Keir Starmer's White House meeting with Donald Trump — the Prime Minister visited Palantir's Washington office and met founder Alex Karp, in a visit arranged by Mandelson. No minutes or transcript were taken. Months later, on 22 July 2025, Mandelson emailed Starmer's chief of staff about arranging a meeting between the PM and Peter Thiel, who was in London.
Global Counsel collapsed into administration in February 2026 with £4.6m in debts after clients pulled out following revelations about Mandelson's friendship with Jeffrey Epstein; Mandelson was separately arrested on suspicion of misconduct in a public office. Subsequent reporting found undeclared government meetings with other Global Counsel clients, including Shell, Equinor, JP Morgan and Blackstone, and a separate investigation by the lobbying regulator into inaccurate disclosure of the firm's work for the Qatar Free Zones Authority.
Strip away the Whitehall specifics and this is a procurement-officer case study: a no-bid award following a recent hire of a former official from the same buying organisation, a contract missing from the public transparency register, and a conflict-of-interest vetting process that only captured declared current interests, not a prior commercial relationship that only became relevant later. Reeve covers this alongside the existing Procurement Act 2023 and personal-liability material.
Paying for the appearance of a grassroots movement
One more piece closes the loop. The PR agency Topham Guerin — built by two former Crosby Textor contractors and best known for running the Conservative Party's 2019 digital campaign (including the "factcheckUK" Twitter stunt) and a £3m Covid communications contract awarded without competitive tender — has, according to the Good Law Project, worked with Palantir on a scheme to pay social media influencers to post positive content about the company and attack the Good Law Project's own campaigning, while instructing participants to keep the sponsorship confidential. Topham Guerin's own website markets its entire service under the single word "Influence."
It's worth being precise about what connects these firms and what doesn't. Topham Guerin's founders worked as contractors for Crosby Textor before founding their own agency — the same Lynton Crosby who co-founded CT Group. That's a shared professional lineage, not proof of coordinated activity between the firms. The Palantir-Topham Guerin influencer arrangement, by contrast, is a directly reported working relationship. Both are worth keeping straight in any account of this territory, because the pattern is damning enough without needing to overstate the connections.
Why none of this has to be declared
The obvious question is why so much of this sits in plain sight rather than underground. The answer is that it doesn't have to be hidden, because it mostly falls outside what UK law defines as lobbying at all. The Transparency of Lobbying Act 2014 only requires registration for firms that directly communicate with a Minister or Permanent Secretary on behalf of a paying client, as their primary business — and even then, only where that contact isn't "incidental" to other work. Strategic messaging, digital campaigns, social media content and think-tank research don't meet that bar, no matter how much influence they generate. Transparency campaigners have flagged this gap for years: only a few dozen firms are on the UK's entire lobbying register, despite a public affairs industry many times that size doing exactly this kind of work.
The disclosure gap, not the rotten core
It would be easy to read all of this as proof that the system is rotten from top to bottom. It's worth resisting that conclusion, because it isn't quite what the evidence shows. Every element of this story — the CT Group tapes, the Palantir contract redactions, the Mandelson emails, the Lodhia referral — came to light because some part of the system still functions: an undercover reporter, a legal challenge, a Freedom of Information request, a judge paying close attention. A genuinely rotten system doesn't keep getting dragged into select committees and tribunals over its own conduct.
The more accurate story is that Britain's disclosure rules were built for an older kind of influence — direct lobbying, declared donations, backroom bribes — and haven't caught up with how it actually works now: PR instead of lobbying, opaque think-tank funding instead of declared donations, revolving-door hiring instead of straightforward corruption, and procurement redactions instead of hidden ledgers. The mechanisms that catch it are working. They're just permanently a step behind, and every case above is a story about how far behind.