When the new head of MI6, Blaise Metreweli, gave her first speech in December, there was a detail that was not captured by TV cameras, but one that those in the room could spot. She was speaking in the Chief’s private dining room with a panorama across the Thames but behind her on the wall was a picture of her predecessor, the first person known by the initial C, Mansfield Cumming. The contrast could not have been starker. Cumming was pictured in full naval uniform, sporting a monocle. The closest Metreweli, the first woman to hold the post, came to that kind of attire was a brooch shaped like a large bug. This was, it is suspected, a nod to her previous role as head of MI6’s Q Branch, which, among other things, makes bugging devices to be secreted around the world.

The job of running the British Secret Service has changed enormously since Cumming’s day, but there are also elements of what sits in Metreweli’s overflowing in-tray that the first Chief would still have recognised.

Cumming founded the service in 1909 as war approached. Today Metreweli said the organisation she leads was ‘operating in a space between peace and war’ and in a world ‘more dangerous and contested now than it has been for decades.’ Much of that new environment she attributed to the threat from Russia with its active campaign of sabotage and disruption in the UK and across Europe.

Today, the job of the Chief confronting these threats also contains elements of continuity. One part of the role involves looking inwards into operations, and another outwards to the world.

MI6 has always been in the business of finding, recruiting and handling people with access to secrets in other countries. Metreweli pointed to her own experience of recruiting and running agents in hostile territory and sitting with terrorists as an operational officer.

But technology has complicated this. There are some ways in which it has helped, of course. There is less need for hanging around at cocktail parties to strike up a conversation with a foreign diplomat to see what you can learn when you can use data to understand and profile people remotely and even contact them, for instance. But running an agent still almost always requires looking them in the eye. And here the new world of what spies call ‘ubiquitous technical surveillance’ makes things much harder. Mansfield Cumming used to meet agents himself by donning a toupée and false moustache and then grabbing a fake passport. Metreweli is unlikely to do that now. Biometric scans at airports, CCTV cameras on streets and pervasive data collection make it much harder and sometimes nearly impossible for her officers to meet people under the kind of cover they used to deploy. That means being an MI6 officer now requires understanding the world of data and code as well as how to persuade people. That has not always been an easy transition for MI6, whose staff used to pride themselves on people skills, while feeling they could leave the technical side to either GCHQ or their own technology branch.

The speech was also notable for signalling a push for MI6 to be more audacious and take more risks. ‘We will sharpen our edge’, Metreweli said. This appeared to be a nod to those who believe the service has lost some of its more buccaneering instincts as it has evolved like any other government department. This has long been a subject of debate and tension within MI6 – how far its internal culture should feel distinct from that of other government departments with some Chiefs moving it closer to Whitehall and others emphasising its different role.

There has also long been a tension within MI6 between pure intelligence collection and covert action. The two can work effectively in tandem but the new focus seems to be towards doing things, not just finding things out. It is no good just collecting intelligence that sits half-read in a folder on a minister’s desk; rather, the aim is to have an impact. A reference in the speech to tapping into ‘our historical SOE instincts’, meaning the Special Operations Executive, which was involved in sabotage and propaganda in wartime occupied Europe, was also surely a hint that the service is gearing up to take the fight more aggressively to the Russians, even if not quite playing by their rules.

As well as the part of the job that looks inwards at how the service acts operationally, the other aspect is the one that looks outwards. One former Chief told me that the thing that surprised him most on taking the job was how much of his time was taken up not overseeing operations but dealing with external relationships. One important set of relationships is across the river with Westminster. Metreweli’s predecessor, Sir Richard Moore, was a skilled Whitehall operator who knew how to ensure MI6 had political cover for its work. Understanding the shifting political and policy winds is a core requirement for the job. It was notable that Metreweli elected to say next to nothing about China in her speech, a touchy subject as the government seeks to improve relations with Beijing. This is a particularly sensitive issue in the wake of the collapse of the recent parliamentary spying case, partly on the grounds of how the threat from China is defined (of course, it is also worth noting that the accused men in that case denied all the charges brought against them).

Another set of relationships extends further afield. The most important historically has been with the Americans and with the CIA. Heads of British intelligence agencies have long made preserving that alliance a priority in itself because of the benefit of being tied into a much larger machine. At the moment, insiders stress that on a day-to-day operational level, this relationship remains close. But the new Trump administration’s National Security Strategy could herald a profound shift from Washington, with the White House offering more criticism of Europe than of Moscow and Beijing. No one is yet quite sure how far that document represents political rhetoric rather than something that will substantively shape policy, but few think that the strategic relationship will be as easy as it once was. Metreweli’s speech was all about the importance of values, but the sense in which Washington and London are operating from a common or close set of values is diminishing. There have already been limits placed on British spies and the military in sharing information. As the American relationship becomes more complicated, the role of an MI6 chief in acting as a discreet envoy to reach out to a wider range of partners is likely to increase in importance. ‘Our world is being actively remade’, Metreweli noted, and relationships with European spy services will need to be deepened as well as with other parts of the world.

The new Chief concluded by saying that MI6 was the ‘quiet service, the hidden service’. But in this dangerous new world, quiet is unlikely to mean the same as standing idle.