The next head of MI6 will be a woman for the first time in the service’s history, as fears arise that frontrunner ‘Beijing Barbara’ is too soft on China.
Final interviews were held with three candidates, all women, last week, as current head Sir Richard Moore is set to stand down in the autumn.
Two of the candidates are MI6 officers who cannot be named due to security reasons while the third, Dame Barbara Woodward, is the British Ambassador to the United Nations.
Sir Richard, who is also known by the codeword ‘C’, previously decided it was time to follow in the footsteps of sister agency MI5 – which has already had two women chiefs.
In a tweet in 2023, Moore, who has been in the post since 2020, said: ‘I will help forge women’s equality by working to ensure I’m the last C selected from an all-male shortlist.’
About 3,600 personnel are employed by MI6 in its London headquarters at Vauxhall Cross on the south bank of the River Thames and in covert locations around the world.
But despite nearly half of them being women, with a growing number working in senior roles, none has ever made the shortlist to become the head of the service.
Now that Dame Barbara, 63, is the leading contender, however, concerns have been raised that she could be seen as too close to China to take on the role.
Two of the candidates are MI6 officers who cannot be named due to security reasons while the third, Dame Barbara Woodward (pictured), is the British Ambassador to the United Nations
Final interviews were held with three candidates, all women, last week, as current head Sir Richard Moore is set to stand down in the autumn. The successful candidate will be known as ‘C’, unlike in the James Bond films, where Judi Dench was known as ‘M’
She is also understood to have no intelligence experience, at a time when China has been accused of launching aggressive spying operations in the UK.
Dame Woodward is the most senior woman in the foreign service for the UK, and has also spent time in Beijing.
But she has been criticised for failing to voice any real opposition to the Chinese regime while serving as ambassador there between 2015 and 2020.
Among other issues, she is said to have clashed with other figures in Whitehall over the UK’s approach to China’s persecution of the Uighur minority Muslim population – who have been subjected to treatment considered by many too be genocide.
Tens of thousands have been forcibly sent to ‘re-education’ camps – where there is evidence they are subjected to torture and abuse.
When five MPs were sanctioned by China over their outspoken criticism of the treatment of the Uighur people, the Dame is said to have done ‘absolutely nothing to help’.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader who was also sanctioned by the Chinese, told the Times: “This appointment is of the greatest importance to our security and any ambivalence towards the enormous threat that China poses will end in disaster for the UK.
‘Those of us sanctioned and attacked by the Chinese state apparatus on a regular basis will have concerns that she was less than robust about Chinese actions and only raised Xinjiang and the Uighur when she left China.”
Richard Moore (pictured), the head of MI6, who is also known by the codeword ‘C’, has signalled the time has come to follow in the footsteps of sister agency MI5 – which has already had two women at its helm
And shortly before leaving the country, she gave an interview to an English-language paper in China in which she dismissed Taiwanese independence as an option.
The Dame has experience in international relations, having studied it as a master’s degree at Yale.
She then taught English in Beijing before joining the Foreign Office in 1994. She has also previously headed up the UK Border Force Agency.
There have been 17 male chiefs and no female chiefs of MI6 since 1909.
The secretive agency focuses on intelligence gathering abroad.
The winner will be decided by Sir Keir Starmer based on the recommendation of an expert board – including David Lammy, the foreign secretary, and Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser.
