DC Edit | From ‘Q’ to First Lady ‘M’
The author who made their favourite spy 007 had also appointed a woman as head of the caboodle at MI6 and called her M, not C as the department calls its head because one Cummins headed it;
Fans of James Bond, the mythical 007 with a licence to kill who has become the best-known spy over the last seven decades since Ian Fleming first imagined him as his alter ego, must be super thrilled. The author who made their favourite spy 007 had also appointed a woman as head of the caboodle at MI6 and called her M, not C as the department calls its head because one Cummins headed it.
Judi Dench, who appeared in so many Bond movies, was a mother figure to Bond, but her onscreen presence came with a stern outlook that helped her save the world so many times. She even had death imposed on her in Skyfall but only after she had done a grand job of being a matronly supervisor fighting for the survival of good over evil.
With her first name straight out of the cartoon strip character Modesty Blaise, a criminal mastermind who turned spy for the good of the world, and a surname that could so easily have been that of an arch-villain opposing James Bond, Blaise Metreweli is the real-life spy chief who graduated from being the quartermaster or Q in the department teaching spies their little dirty tricks to beat opponents with innovatively quirky devices.
It is not so much a glass ceiling that ‘Modesty’ is breaking in the 116-year-old super spy department of the UK headed by a civil servant as a glass floor under which the spies and the geeks may be doing all their spying on devices these days while operatives roam the outside world to keep everyone safe. Her job may not be as glamorous as Fleming and such masterly spy novel writers whose works became magically transformed to the big screen made it out to be.
The UK premier Keir Starmer pointed out that this is a time of global instability and emerging security threats where technology is power, and MI6 might be proud to see Q emerge as chief and hope she can keep the UK and the free world it cooperates with secure. How charmingly appropriate this is in a world in which the power of women is increasingly visible day by day as they take jobs and roles that may have been an exclusive masculine preserve on the premise that they are dangerous pursuits.