Defence digest: spies, the Franco-German alliance and the future of the Royal Navy

Defence is never out of the spotlight: a new head of MI6, France and Germany strengthening defence ties and the head of the Royal Navy is leaving

Preamble

As some of you will know, I am delighted, honoured and genuinely excited to have joined Defence On The Brink as a Contributing Editor. You can read about what the platform does and who the team are at the link, and do follow on the various social media accounts to keep track of what we’re doing. I wanted simply to register at this point, for the avoidance of doubt, that we’re all individual commentators, writers, analysts and consultants with a variety of views and, while I think we agree on a great deal, there are bound to be issues we see differently. That’s one of the joys and the catalysts for valuable discussion. So what I say, think and write, I do so for myself and it should not be taken as a “party line”; if we do have official collective views on any matter, we’ll make it very clear. Think of official views as coming ex cathedra, and most of the time you can assume we’re stimulating discussion around the steps of the throne, rather than scrambling up to pronounce doctrine.

The C Factor

I wrote an article in The Spectator in March about the prospect of a new Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (known in Whitehall and throughout the service simply as “C”), after the incumbent, Sir Richard Moore, announced that he would be retiring in the autumn after five years in a punishingly demanding role. At the time of the announcement, there was a lot of speculation that Moore’s successor might be a woman, as SIS had never had a female Chief (whereas the Security Service, MI5, has had two female Directors General). The odds were particularly high as it is known that the Vice-Chief, the Director of Operations and the head of technology, three of the posts reporting directly to the Chief, are currently women.

At the weekend, Tim Shipman, Chief Political Commentator for The Sunday Times, confirmed that outcome, reporting that interviews have taken place and the final three candidates to become C are all women. So it will happen, and the 18th Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service will be female. However, because there is always intrigue in Whitehall if you look hard enough, and because we are, after all, dealing with spies, there is said to be some disquiet at the candidates. Two cannot be named, as they are current SIS employees, and only the Chief is ever publicly identified. The third, however, is the UK’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Dame Barbara Woodward.

Now, the article in The Sunday Times is not, I regret to say, particularly well-informed and has accepted uncritically some very dubious whispers from within government. These were set out clearly by the excellent Dan Lomas, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham, a man who knows the world of spooks and espionage intimately and expertly and has written extensively on the UK intelligence agencies, their history, culture, personnel and operations. I won’t simply rehearse the flaws he points out in Shipman’s article, but I will just pick up one or two items.

One criticism of Dame Barbara Woodward is that has never served in SIS, has never been an intelligence officer or a spy. This is perfectly true: she was recruited to the Cabinet Office in 1991 at the age of 30 and seconded to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s European Community Directorate, including working on the United Kingdom’s presidency of the Council of Ministers of the EEC in the second half of 1992. Previously, she had taught in China and undertaken a postgraduate degree in international relations at Yale University (her first degree was in history at my own alma mater, the University of St Andrews). She then joined the FCO proper in 1994. She served in Russia and China, the latter as both Deputy Head of Mission and British Ambassador (2015-20), she was Director General Economic and Consular Affairs at the FCO (2011-15) and, unusually, for a diplomat, she was International Director of the UK Border Agency, the executive agency of the Home Office responsible for visa applications, immigration, border control, customs and the removal of foreign nationals, from 2009 to 2011.

That she is an outsider in SIS terms is unusual but not unprecedented. Sir John Rennie, C from 1968 to 1973, was a Foreign Office official (and former advertising executive) appointed by Harold Wilson’s government to bring SIS further into mainstream diplomacy and diminish its air of obsessive secrecy, while his predecessor, Sir Dick White (1956-68) was previously Director General of the Security Service. Further back in SIS’s history, its second Chief, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair (1923-39), had been Director of Naval Intelligence and Chief of the Submarine Service. Sir John Sawers (2009-14) and the current C both spent long periods in mainstream diplomacy, reaching very senior positions (Sawers was UK Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Moore was Ambassador to Turkey then Political Director at the FCO). So it has clearly not always been a simple disqualification.

It is not as if Woodward would be starting on page one on Usborne’s Good Spy Guidebook. Having spent more than 10 years at the UK Embassy in Beijing (2003-07 as Political Counsellor then Deputy Head of Mission and 2015-20 as HM Ambassador), she will have had extensive exposure to the threats of foreign espionage, the intricate relationship between diplomacy, intelligence and counter-intelligence and the work of SIS. Moreover, in intelligence as in any other field, it is not automatically a disadvantage to be a relative outsider and to bring a fresh perspective to an organisation.

Indeed, in some sectors it is often sold as a likely benefit; while Sir Keir Starmer’s choice ultimately fell on the über-Establishment Sir Chris Wormald, there was a great deal of discussion of an outside candidate being appointed to succeed Simon Case as Secretary to the Cabinet last year, with possible names including Tom Riordan, then Chief Executive of Leeds City Council, and Baroness Shafik, at one point Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Development but then Director of the London School of Economics and President of Columbia University. These candidates were not dismissed as unqualified but considered as one approach alongside others.

Shipman reports that another source of criticism of Woodward is that she was “too sympathetic” towards China during her time as Ambassador, and reluctant to express criticism of the régime in Beijing. She supposedly “clashed with successive foreign secretaries over her approach to the oppression of the Uighur people in Xinjiang, which has been widely described as genocide”. Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former cabinet minister who was one of five Members of Parliament sanctioned by China for voicing opposition to the country’s government, said:

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.

Sir Iain is, of course, entitled to take that view and it is wholly understandable that he should feel the matter keenly. We cannot know at this stage what has been in Woodward’s mind or what her opinions are, and while he may seek to judge from her actions as Ambassador, it is only fair to note that, given modern communications technology and travel, ambassadors have much less autonomy from the Foreign Office and the government in general than was once the case and are much more involved in the execution of policy decided above them than in forming that policy themselves. We also don’t and can’t know what advice she gave or what exchanges she had privately with ministers, but it certainly has to be part of the context that the post of Foreign Secretary during her tenure in Beijing was held by Philip Hammond, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt and Dominic Raab, which is no-one’s idea of the Diplomatic Service’s first XI.

Some of the other commentary accepted uncritically in Shipman’s article verges on the absurd. One “former intelligence officer” complained that SIS had:

lost their way. They’ve become a more discreet version of the Foreign Office. They seem to have forgotten that their job is agent handling and running and recruiting. Human intelligence is vital but when you get out of the habit it gets really difficult.

If you hear the unmistakeable sound of axes being ground, you may well be right. The idea that SIS has no role in diplomacy is simply untrue and ignores its 116-year history, and no evidence is adduced for the idea that the organisation has “forgotten that their job is agent handling” or got “out of the habit”.

We have no way of knowing if Woodward is, as reported, “the runaway favourite for the job” or whether it is true that “there was not a standout internal candidate”. The competition to be Cabinet Secretary last year featured several runaway favourites, of whom Wormald, the successful candidate, was hardly ever one, and the secrecy which necessarily surrounds serving SIS officers makes judgements on “standout” candidates very subjective.

This is not to say Woodward will or should be appointed. But Whitehall watchers should be aware that some of the mood music emerging is deeply partial (in both senses of the word) and often based on fundamental misunderstands or misrepresentations of the situation. Dan Lomas and Christopher J. Murphy will shortly be published an article in Diplomacy & Statecraft Volume 36, Issue 2, entitled “A, B or C? The Foreign Office and the politics of choosing the Chief of SIS”, which should be a useful corrective to what has gone before.

The Franco-German alliance

Once Friedrich Merz had, after an unexpected scare, been confirmed as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany by the Bundestag last week, he embarked on a tour of European capitals to kick-start the new government’s foreign policy. As is traditional for German chancellors, his first port of call was Paris where he met President Emmanuel Macron, who must be grateful to see a relatively friendly face in the Élysée Palace at the moment.

The centrepiece of their conversation was the announcement of a Franco-German Defence and Security Council. This body is designed, of course, to strengthen cooperation between the countries, in the face of an ingoing threat from Russia and the disengagement from European security of the United States under President Donald Trump. In President Macron’s words, it will “meet regularly to provide operational solutions to our common strategic challenges” and the French leader pointed explicitly to “the systematic threat Russia poses to our European system”. This is presumably a different institution from the Franco-German Council on Defence and Security which was created in 1988 by a protocol to the Élysée Treaty of 1963; it last met in May 2024.

There is very little detail on how the new council will work and how much influence it will really have. It does seem as if President Macron and Chancellor Merz have an easier rapport and a closer relationship than Macron had with Olaf Scholz, the previous Federal Chancellor; both are strong supporters of NATO and stern critics of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and both support significant investment in Europe’s defence industry, although they are at variance on a number of other issues. However, there seems to be a mania at the moment for creating forums for discussion and bilateral agreements and protocols, some of which have an air of displacement activity. France and Germany are leading members of the European Union and of NATO, with Poland they make up the Weimar Triangle, they are both part of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group and in 2019 the two countries signed the Aachen Treaty, an updated iteration of the Élysée Treaty.

These may be helpful institutions and channels of communication, but there must also be a danger that they serve to distract two of Europe’s biggest military and economic powers from taking concrete action. In the same way that the UK government has devoted energy to signing bilateral agreements with Germany, Norway and New Zealand and pursuing a defence and security agreement with the EU, these are mere signals of intent until we see the outcome in terms of coordinated policy, improved defence procurement and joint military action. Let us not allow the excitement to overcome us.

Man overboard: First Sea Lord stands down

It has now been widely reported that the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Ben Key, has stood down from his role as the professional head of the Royal Navy and will be replaced as soon as a new candidate is chosen. In the interim, the Second Sea Lord, Vice-Admiral Sir Martin Connell, will act as the head of the service.

This brings together several strands: the proximate cause of Key’s departure is an investigation into claims that he had an affair with a junior female officer. This is not a criminal issue by any means, but it breaches regulations designed to protect the integrity of the chain of command and, if proven, would represent a very serious instance of misconduct. However, some Royal Navy sources have suggested that Key is being “stitched up” as part of a wider pattern of infighting at the top of the Ministry of Defence. One source told The Times:

I think he has been stitched up to get him out of the picture. He had constantly raised questions about the delays with new ships, funding for recruiting and the lack of frigates, and he was told to keep quiet. Now he can’t say a thing.

Whether this is the case or not, it has to be taken alongside the fact that Key was expected to leave his post later this summer, and he had already made it informally known that he would not apply to succeed Admiral Sir Tony Radakin as Chief of the Defence Staff when the latter steps down this autumn. Key is three days older than Radakin but would otherwise have been a strong candidate for the role as head of the armed forces; he has a strong reputation for effectiveness among many colleagues, and, as Chief of Joint Operations, was felt to have made the best of terrible circumstances in overseeing Operation Pitting, the UK’s evacuation of Kabul in August 2021.

The reason for his decision not to apply to be CDS, it was widely believed, was that he was unwilling to be responsible for further cuts in the capability of the armed forces and believed the Royal Navy faced very serious challenges to its future. One colleague said Key felt he “can’t fix the navy”; he had been “dealt a terrible hand and hasn’t got the resources and levers he needs to fix the mess”. I will come back to the candidates for Chief of the Defence Staff in more depth at another time, but it will be a particularly important and difficult selection: the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roly Walker, has only been in post since June 2024, and the Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, General Dame Sharon Nesmith, for reasons not at all of her own making but reflecting the gradual acceptance of women into various branches of the Army, has relatively narrow experience at a junior level in the Royal Corps of Signals. This has led to suggestions, to which I don’t subscribe but are indicative of the mood, that a senior officer could be brought out of retirement to succeed Radakin.

Because Key was known to be vacating his post as First Sea Lord in the near future, the recruitment of a successor had already begun, and there were rumours in Whitehall that an historic event was in the offing, and that General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, Commandant General of the Royal Marines and former Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, was the front-runner to replace Key. Although the Royal Marines are part of the Royal Navy, a Royal Marines officer has never headed the service overall, though there is an increasing weight of opinion which suggests it is perfectly possible and should by no means be ruled out. I explored the arguments for and against as well as the historical and organisational context in April.

However, this has been throw further into confusion over the last few days with allegations of widespread atrocities committed by UK Special Forces serving in Afghanistan. If true, they are genuinely shocking and profoundly worrying not only because of their flagrant disregard for the laws of conflict but for their frequency and apparent acceptance. In this particular context, however, they have a huge important because Jenkins was commanding officer of the Special Boat Service 2009-11 and then took command of all Special Forces in Afghanistan between October 2011 and March 2012. It is alleged that he failed to report allegations of abuse to the Royal Military Police and instead locked a classified dossier of these allegations in a safe after briefing the Director Special Forces, Major General Jacko Page. The existence of the dossier was only revealed several years later by a whistleblower. Jenkins himself served as Director Special Forces in 2021-22 and supposedly allowed UK Special Forces a veto over applications for resettlement from Afghan commandos who had served alongside them. The potential ramifications of all of this are intensified because there is currently an independent statutory inquiry led by Lord Justice Haddon-Cave into “matters arising from the deployment of British Special Forces to Afghanistan between mid-2010 and mid-2013”.

I’m not in a position to make any assessment of the allegations or anyone’s culpability or involvement. It is obvious, though, that the seriousness of the accusations and the degree of Jenkins’s alleged involvement—one would have to call it complicity, if proven—must raise serious questions about whether he can safely be appointed First Sea Lord, much less Chief of the Defence Staff, for which post he was being touted as the “favourite” only a few months ago.

With Admiral Sir Ben Key’s departure under a cloud and the potential ruling-out of General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, the field for the next Chief of the Defence Staff begins to look rather thin; and whoever is selected will have to deal with the recommendations of the Strategic Defence Review, due to be published in “spring 2025”, as well as the armed forces’ contribution to the new National Security Strategy, which the Prime Minister has said will be published before the NATO summit in the Hague next month. A Defence Industrial Strategy is also being prepared, and former Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and National Security Adviser Sir Stephen Lovegrove has undertaken a review of the AUKUS agreement, yet to be made public; he is now the Prime Minister’s Special Representative on AUKUS, an appointment I looked at briefly in April. As if that was not enough, the Defence Secretary, John Healey, announced in February wholesale reform of the Ministry of Defence and the creation of a Military Strategic Headquarters, which I considered here. He expanded on these plans last month.

I cannot think of a time when a new Chief of the Defence Staff last came to office with so many major developments underway or impending, to which of course we can add the ongoing challenge to NATO since the second Trump administration came to office, a UK-EU defence and security agreement likely to be agreed next week and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, including the increasingly shop-soiled “coalition of the willing” championed by Starmer and President Macron. For this enormous in-tray to be facing a depleted field of candidates is desperately bad timing. (My finger-in-the-wind guess is that the job will go to General Sir Jim Hockenhull, currently Commander of UK Strategic Command, although he turns 61 in July, but, as I say, I will come back to this in more detail.)

What else?

Other issues which we should register include the combat debut of China’s Chengdu J-10 multi-role combat aircraft by the Pakistan Air Force in the recent conflict with India; suggestions are that the aircraft had performed well and impressed both its operators and observers.

Lithuania’s finance minister, Rimantas Šadžius, has said that the European Union should seek to maintain strong defence ties with the United States despite the attitude of President Trump and his administration.

Trump has signed a new arms deal with Saudi Arabia worth $142 billion, set to include air and space capabilities, missile defence, maritime and border security, the modernisation of ground forces and upgrades to communication systems.