£568.1bn over budget across 116 major UK projects — traced to the firms collecting the fees.
Every figure links back to a named public source — NAO, PAC, departmental annual reports, Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, and company filings. Graded for rigour, updated continuously.
Tempest / GCAP Fighter is 500% over budget.
Next-gen fighter jet with Italy and Japan. 2bn initial phase now 12bn+.
- Rolls-Royce plc£2.0bn
- Edgewing Limited£686m
- Japan Aircraft Industrial Enhancement Co., Ltd (JAIEC)£3m
Three of the 33 connection stories Gracchus is tracking this week.
Named individuals and firms whose private interests cross tracked UK government contracts — rotated weekly, sourced to the regulator or court record.
Every project record is built from named public sources — NAO and PAC reports, departmental annual accounts, Contracts Finder / Find a Tender OCDS releases, and Companies House filings. Each citation is graded A–D for rigour, and contractor £ values are tied back to the specific contract notice or transparency return that disclosed them. No anonymous sources, no estimates without working.
Who’s been paid whom across the UK’s public purse.
A sourced canvas of 662 entities and 842 award edges across 2022–2026. Every line back to a named public notice.
What changed in the data and the catalogue over the past two weeks — new datasets folded in, new connection stories shipped, methodology updates.
Money Map — annotated walking tours
+ 4 walking toursFour guided narratives walk first-time visitors through the canvas: The PPE story (Mone → Bourne → Meller via VIP lane), The Greensill thread (Cameron lobbying → Crothers dual role), The defence cluster (MoD → Cook Defence → Lee/Palantir → JCB), and The cross-party hedger (Deloitte's both-sides giving). Each tour walks 2–4 stops; the canvas auto-pivots to each entity in lens mode while a floating card explains what the reader is looking at. Reduces the cold-start problem of landing on a 700-node graph with no narrative entry point.
Catalogue expansion — 4 more connection stories
29 connection stories liveAdded: JCB / Bamford family donor-contractor cluster (£19.15m donations, 70 records, 2003–2025; British Army backhoe contracts; £26m BEIS hydrogen grant); Boris Johnson post-office appointments (Daily Mail breach of ACOBA Rules + Ministerial Code, GB News approved with conditions); Sir Iain Duncan Smith Centre for Social Justice dual role (CSJ founder; Universal Credit policy lineage; Register of Members' Financial Interests); Sir John Whittingdale post-DCMS media-sector portfolio (SWNS, ALCS, FIP, plus ACOBA correspondence on the Alphasights / Betting and Gaming Council £1,000-an-hour role).
BuyerDetail — ministerial meeting counts
+ ministerial-access on BuyerDetailOpen a tracked department's drawer (Cabinet Office, MoD, DHSC, Home Office, BEIS, HMT etc.) and the published ministerial-meeting count for 2012–2025 now sits as a small 'Ministerial access' section. Sourced from Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists data already on the site's Lobbying view. Honest about the scope: consultant lobbying only — in-house lobbying and informal access remain outside the public record.
PersonDetail — current-parliament declared interests for matched MPs
+ MP register in PersonDetailOpen Sunak's PersonDetail drawer and you'll see his £3.3m current-parliament outside income alongside the historical Infosys connection. Cox shows zero current-parliament earnings (the BVI work ended) but the section makes the negative explicit — 'no outside earnings declared in current parliament' is an editorial fact too. Sourced from the Register of Members' Financial Interests via the existing 650-record MP dataset already used on the Transparency → MP Pay view. Matches by name normalisation with last-name + first-initial fallback for honorific variants ('Sir Geoffrey Cox KC' → 'Geoffrey Cox'). Peers and non-MP subjects (Mone, Hammond, Crothers, Bourne etc.) skip the section silently — they're not in the Commons register.
Money Map — four saved 'quick view' presets
+ 4 quick-view presetsOne click snaps the canvas to a curated cross-section: Donor-supplier overlap (firms holding contracts that funded the party in power), Defence cluster (MoD lens with people + lobbyists), Health spend cronyism (DHSC lens with donor overlaps), or Lobbyist access (consultant lobbyists and their tracked-supplier clients). Each preset sets layers, tier, minimum £, view mode and lens subject in a single move. Active preset highlighted in amber when current state matches. Sits in a 'Quick views' row above the filter chips on desktop and at the top of the mobile Filters sheet.
Cross-link — Stories ↔ Projects, both directions
+ bidirectional Stories↔ProjectsOpen a project dossier (HS2, Universal Credit IT, Crossrail etc.) and the connection records about its contractors now surface alongside the existing supplier breakdown — 'Sir Robert McAlpine donated to Conservative party' lands on HS2's page automatically. Reverse direction too: open a Story card and a 'Projects involving [supplier]' section appears in the drawer, listing tracked Gracchus projects where the supplier is a contractor with a tap-through to each project's dossier. The catalogue stops being island-of-stories and starts behaving like a navigable graph.
Money Map — base-layer default + Lens works for every node kind
+ readable defaultsFirst-time visitors now see the base layer (suppliers, buyers, projects, £-flow edges) by default rather than all 700+ nodes at once. People, parties, donors, lobbyists and adjacent firms are one click away — the Layers panel gains a Base-only / Show-all preset toggle. Supplier-overlap rings stay visible whatever the donor layer state — they're metadata on the supplier itself, not a separate entity. Lens mode now properly handles people, parties, donors and lobbyists as subject — click any of those bubbles or arrive via cmd-K and the canvas correctly pivots to the ego network.
Money Map typography — brought into line with the FT/Bloomberg site scale
+ readable on Money MapMoneyMapStyles had hard-coded font sizes from before the site-wide typography pass (6836066). Body prose, drawer text, story-card content, panel descriptions are now sized at 15–17px to match the rest of the site — not the smaller 11–14px Money Map was using since it was first built. Editorial smallness preserved where it earns its place (eyebrows, kickers, chips, citation glyphs, canvas bubble labels). Reader-prose bumped; UI chrome unchanged.