Blaise Metreweli appointed as MI6’s new chief

Global instability and security vulnerabilities

As a country, we are stepping into a period of global instability and heightened tension. We’ve already witnessed a series of cyber, economic and trade incursions by hostile states that have laid bare vulnerabilities in our defence networks and disrupted our daily lives.

This year, for example, three Iranian nationals appeared in court charged under the National Security Act with plotting espionage on behalf of Iran’s foreign intelligence service; an operation that targeted journalists and even an RAF base in Cyprus. With the US’s strike on Iran last week, the scale of threat is now exponentially growing.

Meanwhile, China’s expanding footprint in critical global markets, and its increasingly assertive military posture in the South China Sea, pose strategic challenges to UK interests. A forthcoming government audit has already warned of cyber-security threats and supply-chain vulnerabilities stemming from over-reliance on Chinese investment and technology.

To the north, Russia’s Kremlin remains undeterred. In May, the Prime Minister announced the largest-ever sanctions package against Putin’s “shadow fleet,” targeting more than 100 oil tankers to protect our subsea infrastructure from malicious damage.

And in the Middle East, the risk of wider conflict spilling over from Israel’s tensions with its neighbours continues to loom large, threatening to drag us into another volatile theatre.

All of this surface activity is amplified by the uncertainty that President Trump’s presidency brings to long-standing alliances and world orders, making it more vital than ever that our leadership at every level remains agile, resilient and united.

The technical challenge

As the former head of Q Division, Metreweli is uniquely equipped to navigate a complex technological landscape that’s evolving faster than ever – a change that in itself elevates the stakes of our entire security environment. As AI eats into offensive and defensive capabilities, as machine learning and image recognition software makes it harder to stay anonymous, the scale and pace of information and mis-information is a threat to democracies worldwide and no doubt to the tradecraft of agencies like MI6.

Then there’s the rise of quantum computing, offering unprecedented processing power and threatening the established security models of the internet and telecommunications around the world.

The leadership challenge

As a beacon of soft power, some of our greatest strengths lie in diplomacy and the shrewd art of securing strategic wins behind the scenes. The balance of greater funding into our UK defence and intelligence budgets is a welcome sign, but how to prioritise where and how to spend?

To expand and enhance our soft-power and smart-power capabilities, we must invest in realistic skills development and proper, strategic collaboration across industry and government. For a leader, embracing this mission carries a significant and weighty responsibility. There is a lot riding on this success.

The core challenge facing Blaise is the pace of change defining the new security and technological environment; added to this, the multifaceted hurdles across funding, data, collaboration and radical approaches for novel intelligence concepts. This complexity requires testing and learning fast. It requires feedback and clarity of prioritisation. It requires autonomy and authority at the right levels to deliver at pace. And it requires transparency, openness and trust. All of these are challenges in most big hierarchies, but here there is the added wrinkle of having to manage secrets that protect lives.

This is a digital challenge in that it tests not only the technical landscape, but also the established processes and methods. Despite all the required secrecy MI6 is a government department, albeit one with some unique skills. It still has to interpret data, prioritise, invest wisely, create the conditions for people to thrive and work on services that are critical for our national security.

By embracing a rigorous test and learn ethos paired with a bold digital transformation strategy, MI6 can break free from legacy constraints and evolve into a truly adaptive intelligence organisation. This will ensure that MI6 not only survives but thrives in the internet era, staying one step ahead of adversaries and safeguarding the nation’s security for decades to come.

The stakes are high.