There are many reasons why former health secretary Wes Streeting feels he does not have the support of the Labour Left to challenge Keir Starmer for the keys to No 10.

Chief among them is his association with the serially disgraced Peter Mandelson. But there is another sun he's flown too close to: The £280billion US tech behemoth Palantir.

It is a crime beyond the pale for Jeremy Corbyn, who last week witheringly dismissed Streeting's chance of leading his former party. 'After all, [he presided] over Palantir being brought in to our National Health Service,' he said.

For many on the hard-Left, the data analytics firm has become a curious obsession. To them, there is no greater threat to democracy than the MAGA-aligned, CIA-spawned 'spyware' company that supports Israeli bombing campaigns and Donald Trump's immigration raids.

To their dismay, Palantir – a firm co-founded by an eccentric billionaire – has been handed more than £900million worth of public sector contracts in Britain.

These include deals with the Ministry of Defence, the Financial Conduct Authority, and 11 police forces – purportedly to help make better use of their data.

The Metropolitan Police, however, is not about to become one of Palantir's clients after London mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a proposed £50million contract last week.

Scotland Yard had hoped Palantir's AI technology would automate intelligence analysis in investigations, but Sir Sadiq cited 'serious concerns' over the deal, having previously made it plain that City Hall would only fund firms that 'share the values of our city'.

The Met says it will have to reduce officer numbers if the deal collapses. Palantir's UK chief executive Louis Mosley (more on him later) accused the London mayor of 'putting politics over public safety'.

He told Times Radio last week: 'He [Khan] talks about values, but I think what Londoners value is not being mugged, not being raped by a serving police officer, and that's really what the focus here should be.'

But by far the biggest flash point is Palantir's £330million contract with the NHS.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski – who described the tech giant as a 'sickness inside our country' – along with the British Medical Association (BMA), privacy activists and many Left-wing MPs, would like to see the firm unceremoniously dumped when its NHS contract is up for review next year.

Their hysterical campaigns warn that it gives a secretive company whose background is in military intelligence access to £10billion worth of patient records – and that a firm whose chairman once said 'the NHS makes people sick' is a wholly inappropriate partner.

It's created an almighty din, but is the reality getting lost amid all the noise? As we shall see, vanishingly few MPs – least of all Polanski – have a clear grasp of what Palantir actually does.

And some NHS insiders have told the Daily Mail that ditching the firm would be a grave mistake.

They say Palantir is offering a unique solution to unscrambling an outdated data heap that could, in time, save thousands of lives.

So, what is the US firm really up to? And is it the saviour of our crumbling institutions, or the death knell for our democracy?

It is, in many ways, no surprise that Palantir has set alarm bells ringing. The company was co-founded in 2003 by libertarian billionaire and PayPal founder Peter Thiel, an outspoken critic of the NHS who gave more than $1million to the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.

His fabulous wealth and idiosyncratic views – he has questioned the compatibility of freedom and democracy and has an obsessive fear of the Antichrist – put him alongside Elon Musk in the ranks of tech-bro bogeymen.

Thiel's image has not been helped by his more than 2,200 appearances in the Epstein Files, with most of references relating to arrangements to meet with the paedophile financier several times between 2014 and 2017. Thiel, who is Palantir's chairman, has since described his behaviour as 'naive'.

And Mandelson is in the mix, too, as his now-defunct lobbying firm Global Counsel once advised Palantir. Thiel, a German-American, lives with his financier husband Matt Danzeisen and their two children in a nine-bedroom, glass-fronted mansion in Los Angeles, but is looking to quit California due to what he considers its high level of taxation.

He recently bought a £9million mansion in Buenos Aires, a move reportedly tied to his alignment with Argentine president and Trump ally Javier Milei.

Palantir is named after the 'seeing stones' in The Lord Of The Rings books, which Thiel has read at least ten times.

The stones allow users to view events anywhere in Middle-earth and one of them falls under the control of Sauron, ruler of Mordor, who uses it to spy on his enemies. Thiel's detractors would argue such behaviour sounds only too familiar.

The firm's chief executive and co-founder Alex Karp is an equally controversial character.

Last month he published a 22-point 'anti-woke' manifesto, in which he criticised the idea that all cultures are equal, arguing some 'remain dysfunctional and regressive'.

He also spoke of the need for US military dominance, 'hard power' and the manufacture of AI weapons. Palantir says these statements are in line with its goal of supporting the West, which is why it refuses to work with adversarial nations such as China and Russia.

Yet the manifesto was described by one Labour MP as 'the ramblings of a supervillain'. The company began life serving the FBI and CIA, helping them mine vast troves of data in a bid to track down terrorists and human traffickers.

More recently its technology has been used to support targeted immigration raids in the US and aid the Israeli military in its war in Gaza – neither task likely to endear it to the head-bangers of the hard-Left.

Nor is the fact that Palantir's UK chief executive Louis Mosley is the grandson of wartime fascist leader Oswald Mosley.

Mosley has previously said that his grandfather 'died long before I was born', adding: 'I certainly don't share any of his views.'

So how has Thiel, an ideologue whose technology has been fine-tuned for use by surveillance agencies, become so embedded in the NHS?

This is where it gets tricky because the nature of Palantir's contract with the NHS, as well as what the firm actually does, is poorly understood.

The NHS is a sprawling and often badly integrated network of organisations at national, regional and local levels.

The database is archaic compared to other developed countries. Patient records are deposited geographically, some with your GP and some with hospitals you may have attended.

Different departments use different ways of recording data and so it doesn't always translate or transfer seamlessly.

In the event of an accident, the appropriate file from your GP may not get to the paramedics in time, or records might get lost in the system if you move to another part of the country. This means beds and operating theatres can lie empty at a time when there are more than six million people on the NHS's waiting list.

What the NHS wants to create – and has picked Palantir to deliver – is an integrated system known as the Federated Data Platform (FDP), which is a digital tool that lets you view and analyse information from many different computers at once without copying or moving it from its original home.

But critics say Palantir is the wrong solution – and that it will sell on patient information. That is certainly Polanski's position. In a video that has been viewed two million times online, he says Palantir is a 'sickness… [that] runs to the very heart of our system… and it's spreading'.

Corbyn, too, has campaigned against Palantir. In a parliamentary debate he said the deal will allow the firm to 'take over our NHS' and use health data for its own 'research purposes', before citing its partnership with the Israeli military.

Jolyon Maugham, the Left-wing barrister behind the Good Law Project, has claimed NHS data could be used to track and deport migrants, pointing to Palantir's work with America's immigration agency ICE, which has become notorious for its aggressive approach to hunting down undocumented migrants.

'It is the re-purposing of healthcare data for surveillance,' he said.

Palantir has pushed back hard, with Mosley responding to Polanski's video by highlighting a number of inaccuracies, including his claim that the firm was awarded 'the biggest defence contract in UK history'.

Mosley also pointed out Palantir has 'no more access to NHS data than Microsoft has to the contents of your Word documents'.

But don't just take his word for it. Tom Bartlett, former deputy director of data engineering at NHS England who until last month was a consultant on the project, agrees.

Bartlett, who is independent and has not been paid by Palantir, told the Daily Mail the data is owned by the NHS and during his time working on the FDP there was never pressure from Palantir to access it. Any attempts to do so illegally would be picked up on audit logs.

Bartlett says it is a common misconception Palantir is 'analysing' data. It merely provides the software that handles the sensitive data. He adds Polanski's video 'seems designed to scare people'. Palantir has pointed out it would be bad for business if it misused data. Agencies such as the CIA, Karp argues, aren't in the market for using any suppliers with a 'leaky' reputation.

As for fears over NHS data being used for immigration enforcement, that is down to the Government, Bartlett says. 'Palantir doesn't make it any easier or more difficult to do that.'

There have also been questions over how Palantir won the favour of the UK Government.

Sir Keir Starmer got himself in a tangle trying to explain how a visit he and Mandelson made to Palantir's HQ in Washington in February last year was not logged as required by the ministerial code. No 10 said this was because the event was a 'tour' not a meeting, so it did not need to be recorded.

Suspicions were also deepened by the fact Palantir won its first NHS contract in March 2020 without competition as procurement rules were set aside due to the pandemic.

The firm helped the NHS stitch together data about the emerging Covid crisis and three years later it won the £330million contract to work on the NHS's FDP.

This was subject to a competitive tender, but critics say its existing relationship with the Government gave Palantir an edge.

But does any of this matter if Palantir is delivering what the NHS needs? Official figures show since the FDP was introduced, an extra 110,000 operations have gone ahead, there has been a 15 per cent drop in discharge delays and a 6.8 per cent increase in cancer diagnoses made within 28 days.

Precisely what contribution Palantir made to this improved performance requires further scrutiny, but several NHS hospitals have hailed its benefits.

University Hospitals Sussex said the system 'has completely transformed how we manage our waiting lists' and saves staff more than 90 hours per week. Yet this hasn't stopped the BMA telling doctors to shun the programme because of Palantir's association with ICE.

More moderate voices – including the former Tory MP Rory Stewart, who held talks with Palantir when he was prisons minister – have raised sensible points about the risks of the UK becoming reliant on a single US tech firm that appears to be dedicated to serving American interests.

Critics say that, given this and other ethical concerns surrounding the firm, more energy should be put into finding British alternatives.

Bartlett doesn't seem to think so. 'I'd be very keen to hear from anybody who [can offer a better solution], because it would be good for Palantir to have competition.

'Unfortunately nobody has been able to say, 'We can do that'. It's born out of a misunderstanding of what is needed. People aren't understanding the problem properly.'

Lynette Nusbacher, a former senior intelligence adviser to the Cabinet Office who also worked on an NHS integrated care board, says Palantir is 'the first bunch of people you talk to' if you are looking for a company 'that can go into a sea of data and make sense of it'.

The trouble, she explains, is that Palantir is viewed as 'a tech-sector Darth Vader' because of its links to intelligence services.

As a result, the issue has become a political football and, thanks to Palantir's work for Israel, protests have overlapped with pro-Palestine marches.

Indeed, one article in the British Medical Journal argued Palantir's UK Government contracts should be ditched because of its involvement with Israel.

And one of the signatories to the 'No Palantir In Our NHS' campaign is the Islamic Human Rights Commission, the shadowy organisation with close links to the Iranian regime that was behind the recent controversial pro-Tehran rally in London.

The danger is that misinformation put about by Palantir's enemies could do real damage to the NHS by hindering progress.

The last time the Government aimed to build a collection of anonymous GP health records in 2021, around a million patients opted out. This time round, opting out is not an option.

However, this has not stopped the Good Law Project publishing advice on how people could opt out of having their health data shared for other research in response to the Palantir contract.

Although the campaign group acknowledged that this does not currently cover the FDP, Bartlett says the result was it 'directed people toward a mechanism that harms research while achieving nothing'.

'This mood music is really damaging,' Bartlett adds. 'It makes cancer research less complete, population health management less accurate, service planning less reliable.

'Campaigners claim they're coming from a good place. But they're causing the very harm they claim to be preventing.'

It is right that the Palantir contract is pored over line by line. But perhaps it is time to start listening to the people who know what they're talking about.