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........

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