The reasons may well lie in the aftermath of a bruising argument within Whitehall about how to handle the recent case of two Britons who were arrested for spying for China, and with a growth-boosting visit to Beijing by the prime minister scheduled for 2026.
Sources in the service suggest the aim of the China strategy is to avoid confrontation in order to further intelligence gathering and to have a more productive economic relationship with Beijing. More hardline interpreters of the Secret Intelligence Service will raise eyebrows at her suggestion that the “convening power” of the service would enable it to “ defuse tensions.”
But there was no doubt about Metreweli’s deep concern regarding the impacts of social media disinformation and distortion, in a framing that seemed just as worried about U.S. tech titans as about conventional state-led threats: “We are being contested from battlefield to boardroom — and even our brains — as disinformation manipulates our understanding of each other.”
Declaring that “some algorithms become as powerful as states,” she seemed to tilt at outfits like Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-owned Facebook. Metreweli warned that “hyper-personalized tools could become a new vector for conflict and control,” affecting societies and individuals in “minutes, not months — my service must operate in this new context too.”
The new boss used the possessive pronoun, talking about “my service” in her speech several times — another sign that she intends to put a distinctive mark on the job now that she has, at the age of just 48, inherited the famous green-ink pen in which the head of the service signs correspondence.
Metreweli is an experienced operator in war zones including Iraq who spent a secondment with MI5, the domestic intelligence service, and won the job in large part because of her experience in the top job via MI6’s science and technology “Q” Branch. She clearly wants to expedite changes in the service — saying agents must be as fluent in computer coding as in foreign languages. She is also expected to try to address a tendency in the service to harvest information without a clear focus on the actions that should follow — the product of a glut of intelligence gathered via digital means and AI.
She was keen to stress that the human factor is at the heart of it all — an attempt to reassure spies and analysts wondering if they might be replaced by AI agents as the job of gathering intelligence in the era of facial recognition and biometrics gets harder.
Armed with a steely gaze, Metreweli speaks fluent human with an occasional small smile. She is also the first incumbent of the job to wear a very large costume jewelry beetle brooch on her somber navy attire. No small amount of attention in Moscow and Beijing could go into decoding that.