Blaise Metreweli is a boot in the face for DEI
Blaise Metreweli has been appointed as the first female head of MI6 from an all-woman shortlist composed on merit alone. It’s proof that some women don’t need DEI to break glass ceilings, says Eliot Wilson
Just over a week ago, it was announced that Blaise Metreweli, a career intelligence officer currently serving as director general of technology and innovation, will succeed Sir Richard Moore later this year as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, more commonly referred to as MI6). She will be the 18th person to hold the position, and will henceforth be known in Whitehall simply as “C”, but she is the first woman to head the organisation since it was created 116 years ago.
The appointment of a woman was overdue. Dame Stella Rimington became director general of MI5, the internal counter-intelligence and security agency, as long ago as 1992, and Baroness Manningham-Buller followed in her footsteps 2002-07; GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence agency, saw its first female director when Anne Keast-Butler was appointed in 2023. SIS is the last of the three agencies to pass that milestone.
The glass ceiling is genuinely shattered when the fact of its breaking is quickly forgotten
We live in highly polarised times, and it was not long before that manifestation of inadequacies and insecurities rather grandly dubbed “the manosphere” emerged on social media. One X user wailed about “our safety being compromised just to appease some far left woman quota”, while a female ally mourned “another DEI hire then”. “Let’s hope she’s better than Cressida Dick,” warned another armchair spymaster, presumably on the basis that if one woman fails in a senior job others are likely to do so.
DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – is one of the bloodiest battlefields of the current culture wars. In the UK it tends to be branded as EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion), with DEI an American usage; like so many contentious policy areas, it began benignly as an attempt to remove social, cultural, economic and institutional barriers to marginalised minority groups.
For many on the populist right, it is now anathema; it is difficult to argue that it has not often overreached, and the idea of ‘affirmative action’, the prioritisation of minorities to make good past discrimination, enjoyed a much greater acceptance in the United States than it gained in the UK. However, the passage of the Equality Act 2010 in the last days of Gordon Brown’s government raised identification with one or more of its “protected characteristics” above all else; the hopeless pursuit of diversity targets found the Royal Air Force discriminating against white men and Thames Valley Police favouring candidates for promotion because of their ethnic background.
Succeeding through ability
The example of Blaise Metreweli is a heartening case of a woman succeeding through ability, perfectly able to apply enough pressure on her own to break the glass ceiling. She read anthropology at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where she found time to be part of the winning crew in the 1997 Women’s University Boat Race, then joined SIS in 1999. The incoming chief therefore has a quarter of a century of service to qualify her for the top job.
Inevitably details of Metreweli’s career are sketchy, but we know she has served operationally in Europe and the Middle East and speaks Arabic, and has worked at a senior level in counter-terrorism; she was seconded to MI5 in 2021 at director level as head of hostile states counter-intelligence. Her current role as director general of technology and innovation and head of Q Branch (a nod to Ian Fleming) reflects her expertise and experience in the high-tech elements of national security: she has dealt with Russian cyber attacks and Chinese biometric surveillance as well as nuclear technology.
Is SIS late to the party when it comes to gender equality? Undoubtedly. A litany of outstanding and able women have bumped against a cultural and attitudinal barrier, including Milicent Bagot, Daphne Park and Meta Ramsay. But culture and society have changed: while women were once overlooked and underrated, Metreweli, the product of a first-rate education at Westminster and Cambridge, found herself one of a quartet of women reporting directly to Sir Richard Moore as C. When he announced his intention to retire, his replacement by a woman was all but certain.
It does not make the new C any kind of token to note the fact that she is the first woman in post. Ideally, the brief focus on her sex will move on to her stewardship of SIS in the years ahead – the glass ceiling is genuinely shattered when the fact of its breaking is quickly forgotten. C’s in-tray is daunting, and we should be watching to see how she deals with its contents, and nothing else.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and contributing editor at Defence On The Brink