Comment It might take a particularly shameless company to grasp the opportunity presented by the UK’s coronavirus pandemic and step in with a sales pitch. US spy-tech biz Palantir is willing to give it a go.

In a witness statement to the UK COVID-19 Inquiry [PDF], an ongoing independent public inquiry into the nation’s response to the pandemic (in which around 208,000 people died), Louis Mosley, executive veep of Palantir Technologies UK, said the government should invest in a “common operating system” for its data, encompassing departments such as the Department for Work and Pensions and local authorities.

The government should “deploy this common operating system capability immediately and not wait until the next pandemic or civil challenge on the scale of COVID-19 is already underway. An investment of this kind is already long overdue,” he added.

Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel, who made his money and name by co-founding PayPal. It attracted early investment from the US Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, and won early contracts in US defense and intelligence applicat