In your briefing today:

📣 Prime Minister Keir Starmer remains in real trouble over the Mandelson affair. Yesterday, he told the House of Commons that officials in the Foreign Office had deliberately and repeatedly withheld Lord Mandelson’s vetting results, and insisted that he would have not gone ahead with the appointment had he known. (BBC)

But Sir Olly Robbins - the civil servant sacked by Starmer over the affair - will appear before MPs today, and is expected to claim the Foreign Office was pressurised into approving Mandelson’s appointment, despite being aware of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and his business links to Russia and China. (Times)

📣 The status of the peace talks between the US and Iran is unclear this morning, with Donald Trump offering mixed messages in interviews and social media posts yesterday, but also saying his negotiating team - led by Vice President JD Vance - will head to Pakistan for a second round of talks. That’s despite Iran saying it would not take part without further negotiation. (AP)

📣 A young Scottish soldier has been subjected to an horrific sexual assault by two fellow squaddies who filmed their attack just weeks into their basic training. Two soldiers in their 20s have been arrested. (Daily Record)

Yeah. That Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So do Codie Sanchez, Scott Galloway, Colin & Samir, Shaan Puri, and Jay Shetty. And none of them are doing it for fun. They're doing it because a list you own compounds in ways that social media never will.

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📣 First Minister John Swinney has turned down an invitation to a White House banquet being held as part of the King and Queen’s state visit this summer. (BBC)

📣 More disruption on CalMac routes: the 26-year-old Hebrides, which was due to return from servicing last Saturday, remains in Leith because of gearbox problems. Its return date is unknown. (Scotsman)

📣 Tennis Scotland “missed the boat” to capitalise on the Murray brothers’ success while they were playing, Judy Murray has said. (STV)

📣 Apple chief executive Tim Cook is to step down in September, and will be replaced by hardware chief - and long-time Apple insider - John Ternus in September. Cook will become Executive Chairman, having made Apple the first public company to reach a $1 trillion market cap. (CNBC)

📣 Greece has “stunned” the travel industry by dropping biometric checks for British visitors this summer. The move comes as visitors to the continent from the UK have faced long queues at border crossing points, with some missing flights. (Independent)

📣 The King has given a heartfelt tribute to his “darling Mama” to mark the centenery of her birth. (The Scotsman)

📣 Mobile phones are to be banned in English schools (Guardian)

📣 Four people have been arrested during protests in Epsom, after police said there is little evidence surrounding an alleged rape outside a church in the town. (Independent)

⚽️ Football pundit Michael Stewart has branded the SFA ban which saw him work from Hampden’s car park - rather than the commentary box - “petty and pathetic”. (The Sun)

⚽️ Rangers captain James Tavernier has been discussing his future, and his hopes that his side can lift the league trophy next month. (Daily Record)

⚽️ West Ham earned a point in a 0-0 draw with Crystal Palace to relegate Wolves and also widen the gap between them and Spurs to four points. (Guardian)

🗣️ It’s unusual for technology companies to post political manifestos. Sales guff about building a better world: sure. Mission statements and CSR papers: only too often. But an actual political manifesto that appears to espouse a mix of authoritarian and technocratic ideas: not so often.

But Palantir, a US spy tech company founded by Donald Trump-backing Peter Thiel, has gone there with a long screed posted on X last week: what it called a “brief” 22-point summary of a book written by CEO Alex Carp, called “The Technological Republic”.

It should be of particular interest to us in the UK, because Palantir now has contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds with various parts of the UK state, including a £330 million NHS deal to process and analyse medical data, and another with the Financial Conduct Authority to help it fight financial crime.

The NHS deal was under fire last week in the House of Commons, before the manifesto was posted, with the company called “dreadful” and “shameful” by MPs. They are concerned about handing vast amounts of data about individuals to a company closely aligned with the MAGA movement. The case in Palantir’s defence is that it’s really good at wrangling data, and will produce vast savings and greater efficiency for taxpayer-funded services.

What’s actually in the manifesto? It’s rangy: summarising the summary is tricky. But at its core is a call to digital arms: it says Silicon Valley owes the US, and in this emerging age of AI warfare it owes the US systems that can deliver “hard power”, because “hard power in this century will be built on software”.

Moreover, it calls for less harsh scrutiny “towards those who have subjected themselves to public life”, and is especially critical of “the ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures“, because “the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.”

There’s also a quite firm rejection of inclusivity - “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism”.

Oh - and there’s a section lamenting the post-war “neutering” of Germany.

You can read it all here.

All in all, it’s “a manifesto that boils the company’s dystopian dreams down to a series of bullet points,” as Ja’han Jones describes it on MSNOW. The manifesto amounts, he says, “to a hot mess of contradictions and deranged declarations. Netizens across the political spectrum have denounced the post on X, with some calling it a ‘fascist manifesto.’”

The most sober analysis I’ve seen of the summary manifesto comes from Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, the investigative journalism website that specialises in using open source intelligence. Not surprisingly, he zooms in on the anti-scrutiny aspects of the manifesto, but his scrutiny goes wider than that.

What of the book from which all this is derived? When it came out last year, Bloomberg’s John Ganz gave it a review: his notice was not especially kind. “The Technological Republic is a terrible book: badly written, tedious, and - when they can be gleaned in between the jargon, clichés and repetitions - full of bad ideas, ranging from the merely dubious to the execrable and disturbing,” he writes.

“This book is dismal on the level of both form and content. It heralds a dark and depressing future,” writes Ganz. “The book’s entire vision is deeply undemocratic and elitist. The idea is to enshrine an unaccountable elite of engineers who will ignore the will of a public that might mislead them. They are special souls who must be cloistered away from the world.”

And that is why tech companies tend not to publish wide-ranging manifestos. Because what if you speak your corporate brains, and people think what they hear is a bit silly, or… facist-y?

We might be about to find out. Palantir’s stock price has not performed well this year, and dipped yesterday in a move blamed on the manifesto. Investors aren’t sentimental about these things, but forthcoming earnings will be carefully watched: a company raking in lots of new contracts may get away with controversial online manifestos. But if deals are being frightened away… not so much.

And that lack of forgiveness might be expressed in a way that even billionaire Theil and the company’s backers will notice.

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