BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
The modern obsession with ancestral sin reveals a dangerous intellectual impoverishment in our society. The manufactured outrage over MI6’s new chief Blaise Metreweli’s Nazi grandfather isn’t just misguided—it’s a deliberate distraction from the genuine security threats facing Britain today that our now desperate enemies picked up on and use against us.
While the chattering classes hyperventilate over century-old ghosts, China’s MSS recruits Cambridge graduates by the dozen, Russian FSB hackers penetrate our infrastructure daily, and Islamist terror cells plot in plain sight across our cities.
Consider the delicious irony: the same bien-pensant set currently clutching their pearls over Metreweli’s genealogy would be the first to scream ‘Islamophobia’ if anyone suggested screening migrants from regions where antisemitism remains endemic.
They’ll decry ‘collective guilt’ for entire religions or ethnic groups yet happily ascribe moral taint through family trees when it suits their narrative.
The Foreign Office’s measured response—that Metreweli’s ‘complex heritage’ informs her commitment to counter modern threats—should have ended the debate. Instead, we’re subjected to the spectacle of journalists playing amateur eugenicists, as if MI6 were selecting a breeding stallion rather than an intelligence chief.
To our dear Indian friends who rail against British colonialism (while enjoying the fruits of its legal and educational systems): how precisely do you know you weren’t General Dyer in a past life? The karma you so fervently believe in works both ways. The Sikh grandmother cursing the British Empire might have been a Redcoat rifleman in 1857. The Woke undergraduate denouncing ‘white privilege’ could have been a Lancashire mill worker starving during the Cotton Famine.
This isn’t sophistry—it’s a fundamental challenge to the childish notion that historical grievance can be neatly apportioned by DNA or nationality. The same applies to Metreweli. Her grandfather’s sins belong in the dustbin of history, not her personnel file.
MI6 doesn’t need chiefs with pristine ancestry—it needs leaders who understand the nature of evil. A descendant of Nazis likely has more insight into totalitarian psychology than some Etonian whose family built its fortune on colonial tea. The Butcher of Chernihiv’s granddaughter may prove the perfect foil for Putin’s psychopaths—she’ll recognise their type instinctively.
While the media obsesses over archival dust, they ignore the real scandal: that our security services remain dominated by Oxbridge classicists whose greatest cultural exposure was a gap year in Tuscany. Metreweli’s Eastern European roots—with all their painful complexity—make her more attuned to modern threats than any ten Hooray Henrys swigging back whiskies at 5 Hertford Street.
This faux outrage follows a familiar pattern:
- Find a successful woman breaking barriers
- Dig for any ancestral dirt
- Use it to undermine her authority
- Pretend this is about ‘accountability’
Meanwhile, no one asks why:
- The number of extremists that the security services must monitor is growing exponentially
- Our cyber defences remain laughably outdated
- The Treasury chronically underfunds counterterrorism
Britain faces existential threats that don’t care about genealogy. Whether from Moscow’s assassins, Beijing’s techno-autocrats, or the jihadists our courts keep releasing, the danger is present and growing. We need the most capable minds defending us, not the most politically convenient.
Blaise Metreweli earned her position through decades of service. If she fails, let it be on her own merits—not because some long-dead monster shares her mitochondrial DNA. The only thing worse than cancel culture is ancestor cancellation.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to check whether my grandfather pissing on a dead German on the Normandy beaches (by mistake, the order given that first night was no lights) means I should resign as Editor from this magazine. One can’t be too careful these days.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).