A woman to be "C", head of MI6

So it looks like the next Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) is going to be a woman, the first in the agency's history. According to the Sunday Times, the shortlist of three candidates does not include a man. Ergo, a female "C", the most famous letter in Whitehall. Everyone from the Prime Minister downwards in government refers to the Chief of MI6 as "C". The intelligence service has had a lot of very good women at the top of the hierarchy for many years but every time the possibility of a woman taking over the top job came up it was always a man who got it. Sir Richard Moore, the current "C", is retiring at the end of the year after five years in the post. So now is the time when Whitehall looks at the replacement candidates. The Sunday Times says two of the candidates are insiders, long-term MI6 intelligence officers, and the third, the favourite, is the current ambassador to the United Nations, Dame Barbara Woodward, a former ambassador to Beijing. She'll be the favourite because of her contacts and experience in China, the Number One challenge for the West. But for the intelligence officers in MI6, their choice would be to have an insider in the top job. They always prefer that. It's said Barbara Woodward has no intelligence backgrtound but of course that is not strictly true. As ambassador in Beijing and in the UN she will have had access to classified material and will know the hierarchy at MI6 HQ at Vauxhall Cross. It's not the same as having experience of standing cold and apprehensive on dark street corners in some hostile capital waiting for a source to turn up. But she will know her intelligence stuff. We will wait and see who the mandarins recommend to Sir Keir Starmer.