YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeremy Fleming

lines on the record: 78
first: 2026-02-09
most recent: 2026-02-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That's a really hard question after the softer Alistair one. So I would answer that two ways. And you've touched on it already. We have got to get around global governance for AI. We really have to get our heads around what that means. And whether we do that with an alliance of like-minded countries or we do that through some sort of established multilateral partnership less likely, or if we do that starting with just a few nations, we have to get our head around this because at some time.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have very strong values, who can meet a security threshold and he can be vetted. And frankly, you want to be part of something which I found throughout my career to be always energizing, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately a career well spent. So if you're up for that and you're listening to this, then it's still worth doing.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me answer that question from a GCHQ perspective because it's where I spent the end of my career. So GCHQ, the biggest intelligence agency, thousands of people and a very broad range of professions inside it, analysts, scientists, mathematicians, linguists, people who look after the accommodation, the environment, the estate, people who are making sure that when we're deployed overseas we're safe and and. So it's incredibly broad range of people required to make an intelligence agency work. The happy reality is that you apply online now to publicly available job adverts. And if you are going for an intelligence officer or an intelligence analysis role, then that will be a more tech heavy role than it was at the time, which I joined. But we're looking for the same things. We're looking for people who deeply care about the mission, who”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And talking about it as the long term. I still think we should be approaching it with at least that in mind as we pursue a broader relationship.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd agree with that. I'd also say that the thresholds in the way he takes action at completely different level. I mean, we have seen inside Europe over the last four years increasing levels of violence, of boldness in what Russia is prepared to do in Europe. And everything from intimidation through to killing and beyond from going after supply chains of what they perceive to be supporting the Ukrainian effort to taking steps to get inside critical and top secret systems in NATO and allied countries. So, yeah, I mean, it does pose a very real threat and it's on our back door strategically, Alice, you were good enough to say that you'd listen to a very old speech of mine. I haven't listened to it recently, but I remember, I think I remember talking.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Backdoor militarily, it poses a threat in the way that China hasn't posed a threat to us yet. And we know because we've deeply understand Putin's mindset, because he's told us about it for the last 20 years, how he thinks about Russia and its near abroad. So it is at the moment a different type of threat. It's sophisticated in a different way. And that means that it's different to counter as well. There isn't a one-size-fits-all.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goal is the long term security of the party. Continuation of the state, that's where you start any conversation on the PRC and Chinese government. And it's how President Xi thinks about the world. And so their goal in trying to mount espionage here or pose a threat to us here is to collect intelligence. It's to gain access to things which will make them more economically successful in the future. It's to undermine criticism of them as a regime. It's to reduce in their minds the threats that they see either the diaspora here posing or the country posing to their longer-term interests. So I don't think it's very complicated to see why they do these things.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Chinese diaspora stay in line. And I think you can say, you can point to areas where they're clearly not acting in our interests overseas, including supporting Russia in its fight in Ukraine. So I don't think it's very hard to paint the threat picture, the difficulty and where we always have a problem is in making the balance. And it's not, prosperity and security are not trade-offs. It's not a zero-sum game. You can have a trading relationship. You can have a grown-up intelligence, diplomatic and political relationship, but you've also got to be very clear-eyed that in some circumstances, China poses a threat. And when they pose a threat and when we catch them at it, we call them out.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The diplomat in me. I mean, I'd start by saying that, of course, you'd expect me to say that China is a superpower and it's a country we need to have a relationship with and we need to have an economic relationship with it and there are opportunities from that in the future. But the balance is always a difficult one with what sort of what's the cost of that relationship and what sort of threat does China pose? If I was starting explaining it to a minister now, I'd be using examples of what we found them doing. And so in the last five years, we've found them not only amounting a significant number of cyber attacks, of stealing secrets, of going after IP, but also of attempting to control the diaspora here in the UK of creating unofficial police stations that are trying to make sure that”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wars are always about the will to fight as my military colleagues tell me. And for the time being, I think Ukraine is showing extraordinary resilience. But the losses, you know, the losses are significant on both sides. But there will come a point when the losses become really significant for Russia as it has done at times in its past too. And if you, over a million men now are dead or dead or badly injured from the Russian side. And despite their system, despite the repression and the surveillance, everything else we know about Russia, those sorts of losses, I don't believe that Russia can continue to take over the long term.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To bear. Well, I mean, I think you'd have to say that if you were thinking about the match at the beginning of this conflict, a vastly smaller country, less rich, fewer people, less armed, and to say that four years later they'd still be holding Russia, that Russia creeping forward, you know, a percent of Ukraine territory in the last year, you'd have to say that Ukraine has done a really good job here and one that many people didn't expect it to be able to do. And part of that is because it's brought technology to bear more effectively, more quickly than it does.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's completely different, but the change started before the invasion four years ago. I mean, the change started when Ukraine started to take its security, its cyber security really seriously after Crimea. And it did some pretty extraordinary things at that time, including taking its government into the cloud thinking very seriously about... How it brings the new technology into its defense. And that has accelerated since. Of course, Russia is an adversary, has learned from that too. And what you see as you do, I would say in any war in history, you're seeing a technology arms race as each party tries to bring technology to...”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go to the chem weapons, the bioweapons, switching the whole lights off, the much more proximate and worrying threats are all about population scale harm, crime, fraud. And I don't think actually we're focusing enough of the conversation on that. We like going to the sci-fi end of the spectrum. That said, we need to worry about ChemBio. We need to make sure that we are looking at those tail end risks. And that's why we have a security institute here in the UK and in America and elsewhere to try and think about that.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite a bit, but I used to say, you know, if I had come here from, I stayed last night with my friend Bob, and if Bob just now got a text from me saying, I've lost my wallet, send me 50 quid, he'd probably think, yeah, I'm not going to do that. But if Bob got a thing saying I had an awful journey in from Teddington, and when I got here, you know, Alistair asked me some really tricky questions. I was a bit grumpy on the way out. wallets done. I really can't get home. Send me 500 quid from my text number. You know, you probably think twice. That's actually quite trivial. If you've got access to my diary and you've got access to other sort of data about me, which is probably out there, maybe better protected, but probably out there. And so hyper personalization at a population scale, I think isn't that far off. And for me, whilst we like...”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As AI is an opportunity, it's also a threat, and it needs to be secured. And at your dinner, I'm not surprised that you're starting to hear those sorts of conversations. I mean, the reality is that just at this period of time, then AI is an accelerant for the sorts of threats that we already see. So AI is enabling bad state actors or is enabling criminals to do more of the same sorts of things that they've done in the past, to do it more effectively, more convincingly, and in different languages. I mean, one of the, I do quite a lot of work in Japan. What's really interesting there is how large language models are allowing cyber attackers to be much more obvious in Japan than they were a few years ago when their language did quite a good job of insulating them from some aspects of the cyber threat. So you need to, I think the way the framing at the moment is to think of it as an accelerant. But what's not far around the corner is hyper-personalization, which is the sort of thing you're talking about. I used to use this story.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that Europe can compete exactly on those terms. But the AI that will be the next generation of AI isn't exactly the same as this one. And many people think that as they get more capable, they're going to have to be new ways of doing it. And more people think that actually you can build on the back of what has been happening there and still have a credible offer. So I don't assume that sovereignty means that we have to have all of it, a whole stack that is purely European at every point in the cycle.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next, so I think when you put it like that, I agree with that. There is no doubt that America and China have are dominating that bit of AI, but they don't have it all their own way. And certainly, I know you've been talking a lot to Matt Clifford. If you talk to him about whether UK has advantage, there are places where we have advantage. But is it right for us to think that as a nation we can go out and recreate open AI or anthropic? No, of course not. We're not going to do that. We shouldn't waste our time doing that. In fact, my view is that we should spend the marginal pound on making sure that we adopt AI properly and we adapt Europe.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the fact is the reality for aspects of artificial intelligence. I mean, I hate the term, it's not one of these terms things. Maybe it's a bureaucrat in me. I mean, artificial intelligence covers such a wide range of things. We're talking about it now, then we're largely talking about the large language models. Which have become so prevalent. You're talking about the next”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you that we didn't do a very good job of designing the internet in a secure way. And actually, we're doing the same again with artificial intelligence. And it's back to my point about incentives. It's not just about regulation. In fact, regulation and legislation, I think, is, you know, that's the last resort. That's what happened when things go wrong. But standard setting and international agreements and collaboration on these sorts of things, we ought to do a much better job at that. And we are still suffering from poor decisions about internet protocols that were designed 30 years ago and they're still all over the internet. But to suggest that we'd sort of left them there, now I would completely disagree with that.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so. That was never a reason as far as I understood it. For seeking to have less secure technology than we could have. In fact, that would have been, I think, criminally negligent to have allowed that to happen. I used to say in GCHQ, you know, our responsibility was for making the UK the safest place to live and do business online. You get much more advantage from making tech secure for most of the people most of the time than you would do from, you know, in theory leaving some sort of loophole. So the problems we have with international regulation were that we didn't agree internationally on how to approach it.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“operate on behalf of them. Some of them are affiliated to the Russian state because as you know in that society it's quite hard to do things. Completely freelance. So I wouldn't say they were 100% state actors.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't do it that way. You have to pursue all sorts of other means, but crucially, you have to harden your defenses. You have to make yourself less easy to attack.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A North Korean Iran. Actually, North Korea is a cyber state. It funds a significant proportion. Some people think over a third and maybe as much as a half of its budgets from cyber fraud and extortion. And it's got really good at doing it in the financial services business. So going after banks or cryptocurrency exchanges or it's doing really well at that. But there are also English-speaking cyber criminals in America and Europe, including in the UK. And we can go after those. But if you compare my 600,000 businesses last year in the UK, there were 200 prosecutions under the Computer Misuse Act. There is a structural mismatch here. And you can't, I mean, one of the conversations with ministers, and maybe it plays to your previous point, Rory, whenever you have a cyber attack, I think it is natural that ministers say, well, how can go after them, hit them back with cyber. But it doesn't work like that.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Large proportion of the criminal actors are in places where we don't have any law enforcement reach. And that shorthand for many of them are Russian speaking, not just Russian speaking.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me just finish the I think Jaguar Landrew's estimate, I think, is it costs nearly £2 billion. So this is not a sort of a niche sport. This is something that has gone systemic and strategic. How do you stop this happening? Well, you pardon your defenses. It's actually a really hard thing to go after people after the event. So what you want to try and do is to make yourself as hard to attack as possible. And that is hard, but it really is not as hard as dealing with the mess afterwards”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what happened there was a cyber criminal attacker found a vulnerability in some of Jaguar Landrover's computing systems, quite far out, not very central to their systems, and then found a way to put some malware into those systems such that they couldn't operate and they couldn't critically, they couldn't operate their supply chain effectively. And so what that does in a just-in-time industrial manufacturing process is to bring the whole thing to a halt. And with Jaguar Landrover, for weeks on end, we didn't see cars come off the production. Why is it so hard?”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the number of nationally significant ones had increased dramatically. Over 200 nationally significant. And by that they mean, you know, it could have a fundamental impact on our economy or on jobs or our ability to deliver services.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm glad you've come on to this. 600,000 businesses in the UK had some sort of cyber attack last year. If you're an individual, the crime you're most likely to suffer is a cyber crime. If you took the economic benefits to cyber criminal actors and put them all together, together they would be the same as one of our most important trading partners in terms of scale. So this is a massive thing. And I'm amazed that there's not more politics around it. Because if you're an individual, if your mum is being hit by a cyber attack or if you're a business, you're losing money or if you're a big business in the UK and you're systemically challenged, this is what happened with Jaguar Landrover. These are massive things that we need to take really seriously. The National Cybersecurity Center said last year that the number of cyber attacks that they were seeing in total had come down slightly.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, energy tech bioscience. Actually, the government has eight of them in the industrial strategy. It's a pretty good articulation. Of where the UK can be important and where it will get its future prosperity from. So if you're looking at something like the winter, you've decided that energy is born to you. You've decided that you want to spend on offshore energy for a whole range of policy decisions, as well as economic decisions. And then you've got to look at what are the vulnerabilities that you introduce into the ecosystem by doing that. And what is the opportunity for having a safe trading relationship with China or indeed any other partner on this? Or is this an opportunity to try and do things in a more sovereign way? And so there is a step through on all of these. I don't automatically assume that China equals bad or China equals threat from a security perspective. It's still really hard to switch things off. The sci-fi, there's a big button somewhere that someone is going to hit and the lights are going to go off everywhere. It just doesn't.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the first thing to do is to try and understand the importance of the sector to the nation. What is the thing that we most care about that is most important for our economy, for jobs and our security, and take a view on that? Because as well as a defensive posture that also gives us the opportunity to architect things which are important to us as a country upon which our future prosperity is going to rely. And the old-fashioned way of putting that was our industrial policy. So there are sort of two sides. So what are the things that we really care about?”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Security driven aspects of it, and then there are economic and there are political and they're diplomatic. They all came, what would your framework, though, be hypothetically, how would you think through, what sort of things should a policymaker think about if they're trying to think in the future about becoming very dependent on China or Russia or the US in some sector?”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you think thoughtfully through these kind of choices? So again, today, Octopus Energy has said they want to buy Chinese wind turbines, which they think are 30% cheaper and much more efficient. Canada's allowing in Chinese electric vehicles much, much cheaper than Tesla. You and I were in government when we were all discussing Huawei. My memory basically of that was sitting around tables where for a long time the experts were saying it's okay. We're not that worried about Huawei. And then suddenly we were so worried about Huawei. Huawei was all booted out and it probably cost us a couple of billion quid. How does one work our way through this? Because again, the way I've just described that doesn't make me hugely confident about what these processes are and how they operate and how one thinks reasonably and logically about what is a threat, what's a risk, and how to manage it. Well, you know as well as I do that there are many aspects of those sorts of decisions and there are pure”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, given that we know where the cables are and what they carry, if the Chinese decided by some long stretch of the imagination, they were going to bring in a tunnelling machine and go to them and tap them. We might notice that. I mean, I think it's a good thing that it highlights what is the situation, which is there is significant Chinese espionage activity in this country. And we need to make sure we've got that properly covered. But it won't be happening from the embassy particularly. This is a much broader question here. Okay, Alistair, Jeremy, quick break and then back for more.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed, two of the heads of the agencies have written to ministers now to explain what those processes are and made it public. That's pretty unprecedented, actually. So I think we as an ex-intelligence chief, then you can expect me to go to the real politique bits around all of this. Of course, Chinese have an embassy here. And the fact that it's in one place and it's not in five places around London is probably a good thing. I thought the cable stuff was a load of nonsense. Just quickly for listeners who don't get that reference, what Jeremy's saying there is that famously a fiber optic cable.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I always react to the mega and the super. I don't understand why we describe it like that. It's a reasonable size building slightly outside the centre of London. So my view is that there's a lot of noise around this and probably doesn't deserve that. And so the decision about where to locate it and how to make sure that doesn't pose an additional threat to national security would have been thought through very seriously.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are processes in place to help understand where beneficial ownership sits and to try and make a decision on that and to warn people about that. Now there wasn't legislation that enabled anyone in government to do anything about that at that time”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's probably fair to say. Presumably knew Abramovich was basically a gangster. I'm not going to talk about a particular. But we knew these guys. We knew, I mean, look, nobody was ignorant about how the oligarchs made that money. I think it's already obvious that some of the ways in which Russian society and oligarch competition play out were happening on the streets of London. You could see that.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The takeover of our media today, we've got Abramovich accounts at Deutsche Bank with the federal German government sweeping going through seven years of money laundering and we let this guy buy Chelsea football club. I'm not sure I'm right to focus on the football elster has more to say about that than me. I mean I think you have to think back to the context of the time. If you look back and say clearly it wasn't in our interest to have so little understanding of how the money had arrived.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so no, I don't think that you should conclude that from what I've said, but come back to the role of the agencies. I mean, the role of agencies is to look for threats to national security. Doesn't matter where they come from, they need to look for them. And so looking for a state level misinformation campaign that could have undermined our security is absolutely in the wheelhouse of the agencies. And I think you should have expect them to have taken that seriously.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to get into that as a question? I don't need to listen to the podcast to know you're interested Brexit. If you were to look back to that time and you were to think about our understanding of how misinformation could start to be exercised at scale, then I think you could say, yeah, there was some catching up to do at that point. And of course that most dramatically is illustrated by the way in which the Russians interfered in the US presidential election. Actually, I'm trying to think how much is in the public domain, but the agencies certainly were not blind to that sort of threat and certainly were asked about it, including through the intelligence oversight committee in Parliament. It looked pretty hard to see if there was any break. No, absolutely not. I mean, and that's what you need to remember as well about”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have created too many dependencies across Europe and we haven't paid enough attention to our resilience. It's not just an America thing. I mean, COVID taught us all sorts of lessons around resilience. It comes from a massively interconnected world with technology at its core and a global trading system that's meant our supply chains. We've taken for granted. So yes, I would, with 2020 hindsight, yeah, I sort of agree with you. The context of the time and our interest at the time meant that those decisions would have been really hard decisions to take, I think.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, I mean, I took it to the resilience and the defense point for Europe. I was going to put the UK in a slightly different position to that because we have fulfilled a different position. And historically, we've played much more of a role on security. And we still do on intelligence, by the way. We massively punch above our weight in comparison to Europe and as a partner to America. So that is the fact. If you're asking me how we've created this system over the post-war period, that's probably beyond me. Let's probably think back to me as a historian. But the answer is we've done it because it's been in our national self-interest to do so. Because in that context, a globalized world with America as a superpower, with the only superpower following the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 80s, it was in our interest. And with the benefit of hindsight, 2020 hindsight, I think we can say.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're right to bring this down to resilience, and I think we all realize that across defense, across Europe, we have for far too long relied on a generous American security umbrella. I think UK is in a slightly different way of putting it.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the leadership level, yes, I worry about that. I mean, my successor, I've been out of the intelligence world for nearly three years now. My successor has had four heads of the NSA, or will have had four heads with the appointment of the current one. And I think it is a very worrying signal when the heads of these agencies are being moved on apparently because of the politics. So yeah, I am concerned about.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a liber on trust, but it's also an alliance where the geometry varies over time. And it is not the case that everything we do in the UK is shared with the Americans. It's certainly not the case in the other direction.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it later expanded as a sort of moniker for all sorts of intelligence collaboration and then defense collaboration. And then we even, in my time, we even had Five Eyes. You know, Home Office style, it became a much bigger thing than its original intent. It's not an organization with a charter and an organization. And a whole load of objectives and funding lines. It doesn't work like that. It's an alliance.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I know. If you were operating to me, we're in trouble. So Five Eyes, nearly 80 years long, came out of the cooperation, signals intelligence cooperation during World War II”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will include UK intelligence. So I just push back a bit. I think that's important. Five Eyes. I mean, so funny enough, I always feel quite protective about this five eyes.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five eyes. Let me go back to your swarming with American's point. I mean, that's not true either, but it is true that there are lots of Americans inside our GCHQ. There are also a lot of Brits inside the National Security Agency in America Save the systems have grown up together over 80 years in a way which has kept us both safe. And I'm sure we'll continue to keep us safe. But to think of it as a partnership that is, I mean, so the UK is a junior partner. No doubt at all. But it is a partner. It's not a, you know, it's not just a recipient here. America's security has been dependent on its UK allies at particular points in the past. And what America thinks about intelligence and how I'm sure it's still reporting intelligence in its daily brief to the president.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots of sympathy with that. I have real problems with the tone of the administration. I have problems with some of the actions, as I think we all do. But I think comparing America to China from a threat perspective is just completely wrong.”
2026-02-09 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source