The front line is everywhere: What MI6's new chief signals about Britain's security posture

Metreweli’s first public speech as Chief of SIS sounds reassuringly familiar. It also quietly rewrites the pecking order of threats and the sort of MI6 she intends to run.

Yesterday, Blaise Metreweli – the first female Chief of SIS – set out how the Service will operate in what she describes as a world “being actively remade” by hybrid conflict, technological disruption and converging security pressures. The overt narrative is tidy enough: enduring support to Ukraine, Russia as an “aggressive, expansionist and revisionist” adversary, and technology as both accelerant and advantage. The structure and emphasis tell a slightly different story.

Leadership transition and cultural shift

The speech spends strikingly long on Metreweli herself: a conflict-marked childhood, anthropology, psychology and AI studies, a career that runs through operations and the Service’s technical arm in her previous role as Q. This is biography as institutional signalling. A non-traditional “C” is being normalised whilst a cultural tilt towards technical fluency and diversity is made explicit. Her line that officers should be “as fluent in Python as we are in languages” is not a throwaway; it functions as an internal mandate and a recruitment message in a market where MI6 is competing head-on with the private sector for talent.

Threat hierarchy: Russia elevated, China recalibrated

The more revealing break with precedent comes when she announces she will not do the usual global threat tour. Instead, she concentrates almost entirely on Putin’s Russia, criticising his “historical distortions” and “compromised desire for respect” and describing an export of chaos that now stretches “from sea to space”. Russia is framed as the acute, disruptive actor operating “between peace and war”. China, by contrast, is acknowledged as “central” to the global transformation of this century, with MI6 tasked to keep informing government on “China’s rise and the implications for UK national security”, but without the confrontational language reserved for Moscow. The hierarchy is hard to miss: urgent, kinetic-adjacent pressure from Russia; structural, system-shaping competition from China that demands sustained assessment rather than headline escalation.

Ukraine: Preparing audiences for a long war

On Ukraine, the rhetoric is supportive; the subtext is about duration. Metreweli promises that “our support is enduring” and that “the pressure we apply on Ukraine’s behalf will be sustained”, while warning that Russian activity is likely to continue “until Putin is forced to change his calculus”. Quite how such pressure will be applied – and what would actually move Putin’s calculus – remains unstated. This points toward expectation management more than imminent breakthrough. Officials and companies reading between the lines should assume long-term resource commitments, persistent sub-threshold confrontation, and a continuing requirement to absorb economic and security friction rather than bank on a clean exit.

Technology, HUMINT and the human edge

On technology, the speech pushes hard in two directions at once. “Mastery of technology will infuse everything we do” sits alongside a firm insistence that AI will “augment, not replace, our human skills”. That combination signals defensive awareness of automation anxiety inside the Service and a refusal to concede that data and SIGINT can displace human judgement and human sources as the decisive edge. When she reaches back to Special Operations Executive heritage – “audacity”, “calculated risks”, intelligence that “changes reality on the ground” – Metreweli is effectively licensing a bolder operational posture whilst keeping it anchored in “courage, creativity, respect and integrity”. Intelligence, in this framing, is not just about exquisite insight; it “must drive action”, and that action is expected to have visible effect.

“Front line is everywhere”: Society and firms pulled into the fight

Her most expansive move is to declare that “the front line is everywhere”, “in the minds and on the screens of our citizens”, as disinformation, cyber activity and covert influence blur the boundary between battlefield and home front. Citizens are asked to interrogate algorithms, verify sources and understand how their data can be weaponised, which both normalises a persistent low-level threat environment and enrols the public into a shared resilience project. For the private sector – particularly in technology, infrastructure, finance and data-rich services – the message is more direct than the polite language suggests. MI6 wants “open and connected” partnerships on tools, data and detection, not an arms-length relationship where firms treat national security as an externality.

Beyond Vauxhall: Where US strategy fits – and grates

Metreweli’s framing lands into a broader strategic moment. Earlier this month, Washington released its 2025 National Security Strategy, which recasts American priorities in ways that both align with and cut across the British posture. Where her speech elevates Russia as the overriding acute threat and treats China as a central, long-term structural challenge, the NSS leans the other way: a softer tone on Russia (emphasising stability and negotiated resolution), explicit economic pressure and technology controls aimed at China, and a shift towards transactional, burden-sharing alliances tied to Western Hemisphere priorities and domestic reindustrialisation. That gap between a values-heavy, partnership-driven British line (“integrity”, “respect”, “open and connected”) and a more interest-driven American focus on reciprocity and eliminating “free-riding” trade imbalances is not just rhetorical. It shapes how both capitals will expect allies, investors and companies to behave over the next decade.

For a deeper look at how the 2025 US National Security Strategy reorders American global engagement – and what that means for allies and firms navigating conflicting regulatory, security and commercial pressures – the full breakdown is here. 

Beijing, Moscow and the politics of selective toughness

Metreweli is toughest on Moscow. The more awkward tension sits with Beijing. On paper, China is treated as a central system-shaper whose rise MI6 must keep helping ministers understand; in practice, commercial, diplomatic and legal constraints repeatedly blunt the edge of that posture. The recent collapse of a high-profile UK China espionage case (amid competing imperatives around investment, trade and the evidential bar) is a case in point. It illustrates how enforcement can become selective where economic and security incentives collide – and why apparently firm lines on China often prove more porous than the rhetoric suggests.

That is the space in which Metreweli’s careful, non-escalatory language on Beijing should be read. Not as complacency, but as an attempt to keep intelligence work on China insulated from the swings of public politics and commercial lobbying. The risk, as recent experience shows, is that courtroom reality, economic pressure and diplomatic caution still set the outer limits of what governments are willing to sustain.

For a closer examination of how these trade-offs play out in practice – and how commercial priorities can quietly undercut ostensibly firm security positions on China – see Part I of our series on the collapse of the China spy case: When commerce conquers conservation (Part I).

Metreweli is effectively asking Britain to accept that security now runs through code, contracts and courtrooms as much as through cables and clandestine operations. The open question is whether institutions – public and private – are willing to adopt the kind of risk appetite, governance and partnership models that a “front line everywhere” reality quietly demands.