I rowed against ‘C’ – it’s no surprise she’s the new MI6 chief

The thing about rowing is that you are never really aware of what the people you row with – or against – do when they are not charging up and down the river.

I woke up on Monday morning to discover that the new MI6 chief was a woman. “Great!” I thought. “And how very James Bond.” It wasn’t until I saw pictures of Blaise Metreweli in her Cambridge University Women’s Boat Club kit that I realised I had been racing against her for the past few years.

While this particular race has only been running for four years, I think she’s taken part in at least three of them, for Cambridge. She’s really friendly, down-to-earth and very charming. With some of the Cambridge rowers there is still a hint of the old rivalry in relations post race.

Obviously when we are out on the river we want to win, and some of them carry that with them afterwards, but not Blaise. Whether they’ve won or lost, she’s always warm and approachable and, I sense, up for a laugh. She’s not going to be a stuffy boss – far from it, she’ll be a refreshing change.

In 2024, we had a historically close race that ended in a dead heat (awarded to us, by one foot). Afterwards, as we had a drink and shared the hoisting of the trophy, I chatted to Blaise about what midlife rowing meant to us. We agreed that the sport was a chance to get away from all the other stresses of midlife and recreate those bonds we had when we were younger.

Many of the older rowers have fairly high-powered jobs, and fit in training alongside. Despite that, I’m impressed she has managed to juggle her career in intelligence with such a committed rowing schedule. But it’s no surprise to me that a rower has been promoted to such a high-level position. There are certain qualities that rowers possess that make us highly effective people.

One is time management (albeit that messing about in boats always takes longer than you think it should). You can’t possibly perform at work and on the river unless you strictly timetable your training. Another is determination. In the early Nineties, women’s rowing was still very much a second-class sport. While our male counterparts had hundreds of thousands of pounds of sponsorship from the likes of Beefeater Gin, we celebrated when we were given a tiny portion of that for our kit.

At Cambridge, Blaise will have experienced something similar. It makes you resolute and determined to overcome gender bias. Now she has. Then there is the determination required to push yourself to the max. That dead heat was such a fantastic example of midlife women refusing to say die, raging against the perception of 40 and 50-something women as irrelevant and invisible.

When she takes over her post as “C” from Sir Richard Moore on October 1, Metreweli, 47, will become the first woman to run MI6 in its 116-year history. As the only named member of the organisation, Britain’s foreign intelligence chief has a dual role as an operational leader and a public figurehead.

“The historic appointment of Blaise Metreweli comes at a time when the work of our intelligence services has never been more vital,” said Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, adding that he was confident that “Blaise will continue to provide the excellent leadership needed to defend our country and keep our people safe”.

Tall and athletic, with cropped hair and striking blue eyes, Metreweli does not fit the stereotype of an intelligence chief. “She’s almost a female James Bond,” says one source. “She’s action-packed, she’s urbane, she’s charming, she’s the right age. If you were going to cast a female Bond, you could do much worse.”

A ‘geek’ who wanted to be a spy

Her appointment marks the culmination of a remarkable ascent. Metreweli joined the service in 1999 after reading Anthropology at Pembroke College. (She is the third “C” from Pembroke, after Sir Colin Figures and Sir Richard Dearlove). At Cambridge, Metreweli was part of the victorious Cambridge team in the 1997 Boat Race. She initially applied to be a diplomat before moving into the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). She is said to speak excellent Arabic, and spent much of her early career in the Middle East, at a time when Britain was involved militarily in Afghanistan and Iraq. She is currently the director general of the “Q” section – the gadget shop in James Bond – responsible for technology and innovation, and previously held other senior level director roles in MI5.

“Obviously [her gender] is historically significant, but she is a fantastic appointment in terms of her skill set and her career in SIS,” says Claire Hubbard-Hall, author of Her Secret Service: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence. “She’s spent over half her career overseas, some of that time in active war zones. She is an Arabic speaker, she has the tech expertise.”

Metreweli has also shown an unusual nous for public relations. In 2021, as “Director K”, MI5’s head of hostile states counter-intelligence, she gave an interview to The Telegraph in which she spoke of the need to overhaul the Official Secrets Act, arguing that new laws were needed to “disrupt what is increasingly damaging activity” from “malign” foreign powers. “One of the reasons nobody in the media has ever previously interviewed a Director K is we do our work in secret,” she said. “Necessarily – it’s really sensitive work. But one of the reasons I am talking to you now is we need a whole of society effort.” The National Security Act 2023 that ensued has proved to be a useful tool for security forces.

In 2022, under the pseudonym “Ada”, Metreweli gave another interview to the Financial Times in which she revealed that she was a “geek” who had only ever wanted to be a spy. She recalled growing up abroad commandeering an Usborne spycraft manual from an older brother, learning to write in code. As a handler for field agents, she had to get to grips with nuclear technology as well as managing “incredibly close relationships with a number of different agents who were risking their lives to be able to share secrets with us”.

‘No man’s land’

Being a woman in a man’s world had advantages as well as disadvantages. “In the moments where you’re deciding to become an agent, you’re having to make thousands of risk-based calculations, but you’re not quite sure how to respond emotionally,” she said. “There’s no etiquette. Ironically, it becomes a bit of a no man’s land.” In that space, being a woman could make it easier to break down boundaries.

“I have done some extraordinary things in extraordinary places,” she said. “And I’ve had some difficult experiences, both professional and personal. I’ve had times of trauma and come through the other side, with immense support from the service.”

Where previous chiefs have come from diplomatic roles, Metreweli is more of an insider. “Anyone in the service is going to be very pleased that an insider has been chosen,” says one senior source. “She’s very highly regarded. It’s a welcome appointment. She comes across very well. She’s very accessible, and importantly for someone in that job, very empathetic.”

If there is a question mark over Metreweli, it may be her age. At 47, she is almost a decade younger than her predecessor was when he took on the role. “She is rather young for the appointment,” says Sir Richard Dearlove, who was MI6 chief from 1999-2004. “I don’t know much about her personally. She is a forceful presence, however. She might turn out to be rather good.”

The nation will hope so. When she takes up her new job she will have an unenviable inbox. There are threats from Russia, China and Iran, wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, ever more sophisticated cyberattacks, the endless threat of terrorism. Then there is how to handle the USA, which is an increasingly unpredictable intelligence partner with Donald Trump as president.

All the same, I hope she still finds time for rowing.

Additional reporting by Ed Cumming