YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeremy Fleming

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78
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2026-02-09
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2026-02-09
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  1. “I can understand it because of the turmoil, and I can understand it because of the way in which the current debate is upending so many of those things that we hold dear. But it's simply not true. So if I was on that stage, I'd be saying, of course, some of the actions we've seen recently, we find very difficult to deal with.”

    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

  2. “Well, I find this quite hard to talk about actually in a way because if you've grown up in a system where you've understood where all the values driven institutions sit, what the stakes are in the ground for the international system, then it does feel like a lot of that has been thrown up in the air. When I hear you say that, I'm appalled and slightly horrified that they think it's a common reaction.”

    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

  3. “Big business, the same for intelligence agencies. So it goes wrong because you haven't got the incentives in the right place.”

    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

  4. “Well, partly it's because we've set it up with those sorts of tensions. Partly it's because of the longevity of those who in senior positions. But it has to be about where the incentives are in the system. When I went to GCHQ, I went around the place. It's incredibly complicated. I thought I'd worked very, very closely with it for 20 years, 25 years. And yet when I arrived there, I'm not the foggiest. And what I found was a system of systems, incredibly complex, very, very careful, very clever, motivated, values-driven people doing the right thing all over the place. But in the heart of them, there was a small professional card of people called systems engineers. And I thought, well, I better go and see them. I've seen everyone else. And they said to me, you know how this place works? It works all on incentives. I was expecting a detailed plan of how this thing fits together. Complex systems work on where incentives are in the systems. And it's the same for government. It's the same.”

    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

  5. “The system. I'm not defending the system in, and I agree with you that big strategic decisions that go beyond political spans are really, really hard to manage. Government has a problem with long-range continuity and strategy. Not just because of change of party. That's baked into the system too. So I think it is slightly, I'm not accusing you of this, but I think it's slightly when I hear thinking that is constantly blaming the system, I feel that's slightly lazy because it's not all 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

  6. “But the point is, you are bringing together senior ministers under the Prime Minister to be able to take national security questions. And that has to be a function which is important. Now, I can't recall which bit of that history you were around the table for, Rory. So forgive me. What sits under it is a whole superstructure of assessment of intelligence collection, of discussion that brings together the agencies and Whitehall in a way which is just necessary to make the machine work. I mean, yes, it's about briefing the Prime Minister and ministers, but the process is not just their council meeting. It is a necessary process that brings together the system.”

    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

  7. “Maybe it's just Rory. I'm a fan of the National Security Council. I started to get in and around it when David Cameron created it. But it's fair to say that when you look at the span of the council, depending on who's interested in its operation and how the top group of ministers worked together depends very strongly on how effective it is and what it does. And you won't draw me on examples. But it has gone through peaks and drops of effectiveness.”

    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

  8. “Want to highlight some priorities, and this is the really hard thing. How do you prioritize the work, the critical work we're doing in support of Ukraine against, say, a ransomware actor who happens to be extorting hundreds of millions of pounds that's affecting our economic well-being? It's a really hard thing to do, and it is a choice that ministers are faced with. I'd start with talking about state actors. I think we are still talking about the same list of state actors. I think we have been shy in talking about China as a threat, but we need to talk about China as a threat. Russia's proximate threat because of Ukraine and its actions is incredibly obvious. It's on our back door. We have to keep focusing on. But 80 states now have offensive cyber capability. This is a much broader canvas than it was in the past.”

    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

  9. “And I think that that is probably one of the things that we need to do better at. But if I was sat here today and I was thinking about the threats ranged ahead of us, obviously we are in a world where geopolitics has been turned upside down, where we have a multipolar superpower situation with China approaching a peer-level superpower to America and exercising its power in a different way. And where we have a range of threats coming at us in ways that we probably thought unimaginable even a few years ago, multi-domain from space, or I doubt to right down to old-fashioned spying from cyber threats right across to extortion and fraud on a scale that I think is actually a national security issue now. So you'd want to set the piece about how the threat environment has changed and then you'd”

    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

  10. “Well, I'm going to start by saying that I was there when I was there. I was there with the other agency heads. And I'm trying to rack my memory as to whether we ever had that sort of conversation. I think it's pretty rare to have that sort of conversation. Really?”

    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

  11. “It's a much bigger thing. And then in all of that MI5 still has to perform its role, which is to disrupt the major threat. So I think the balance changes depending on the threat, but the overall need for the three services, the three agencies remains as strong now as it did back in the 90s when I joined.”

    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

  12. “I think the balance changes depending on the exact priority at the time, but I think it's harder to say that one is more important or less important at a particular time. Human intelligence brings you intent in a way that other sorts of intelligence rarely do, you know, a relationship between an agent and someone telling you something enables you to understand much more than the exact thing that they're telling you. And that remains critically important. Signals intelligence, a data, cyber intelligence has become more important and more prominent because of the technology world in which we live. But it's also increased the challenge of getting, if you like, the wheat from the chaff. It's just a much.”

    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

  13. “Different purposes. And for each of those threats that you talked about, they bring those unique purposes and approaches and capabilities to the things that are most important for national security at that day, 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

  14. “Known as the domestic security service, is responsible for disrupting threats to national security and safeguarding economic well-being. So it is an investigative service. It mounts investigations with the purpose of disrupting, and it does that often with law enforcement and through a whole range of other things. The other two agencies are largely intelligence collection agencies. So MI6 does that through human intelligence largely. GCHQ does that through signals intelligence, through collection of electronic data. Both of those agencies are mostly focused overseas. So when you sort of, you'll forgive me for explaining like that, but when you put them together, they do have different”

    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

  15. “No, no, no, I don't think we're trying to play by the same rules as some of those countries you might be referring to. I think we have managed to walk a really difficult tightrope, particularly in the last 10 years, which is to talk about capabilities without giving up secret sources. And that is, I think, incredibly important.”

    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

  16. “It starts at the end of the 80s, and it started quite properly with getting the agencies properly avowed in Parliament. I mean, it is ridiculous now for me to say that when I arrived and I took over the money at MI5, all of the funding for the agencies was hidden in foreign office and Ministry of Defence votes. And the vote holders in those organizations had no idea what this money was for. I mean, it's ridiculous. And so making that properly visible to Parliament, a Mr Lear Committee of Parliament making the agencies on a statutory footing, ensuring that the powers were properly recorded and had statutory, this is incredibly important. And it allows me to say what I've said a lot in public, and I still really believe, which is that, you know, the agencies have to earn their license to operate. We shouldn't take for granted that the public trust us or that Parliament trusts us or that we should be able to do the incredibly intrusive things we do.”

    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

  17. “Close partnerships, but international terrorism was a really good spur for that sort of collaboration because you can't have agencies when you've got the threat as live as it was on the streets of the United Kingdom. You can't have agencies who are not joined up. So MI6 understood that their intelligence collection largely overseas, largely human intelligence collection, had to be in accordance with the threats that were most serious here in the United Kingdom and the things that MI5 were leading on investigating. Similarly, GCHQ had to predicate its intelligence collection around those threats because otherwise bombs go off on the streets in the UK.”

    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

  18. “But I probably disappoint you a bit by saying that for most of my career it felt incredibly collaborative. And the way in which the agencies work together now is completely collaborative, hand in glove. A point at which I left, shared technology, shared people and corporate systems, a shared approach to understanding of threats. And so it didn't feel competitive in that way, certainly, but not by the end. Of course, there are periods when there's friction, and as there are with any close...”

    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

  19. “More money, a regional understanding, a security service that had bases around the United Kingdom, an investment in technology and a whole range of different partnerships.”

    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

  20. “Actually, the change in the UK was slower than it was in America. And my first exposure to this was I was involved in the 9-11 Commission around data and intelligence. And so I was exposed to a side of corporate America, if you like, big tech in its very early days, but also thinking seriously about data and intelligence. And I came back from that experience and with a number of other officers in MI5 said we need to be a technology and a data business. And we started the transformation then. But the resources and the real difference in organization nationally didn't really happen until 7-7. There was quite a slow ramp-up on that. And then 7-7, the attacks in London, four, five years later, that's when the change really happened.”

    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

  21. “It was a huge moment. It's one of those we all remember where we were moments. Although I note that by the time I left the intelligence agencies, people were joining who weren't born on 9-11. And that was quite sobering in lots of ways, not least about my age, but also about how people perceive a threat. But for my generation of people coming through the system, it was completely seminal.”

    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

  22. “Transitional period, and it felt like it was a period when the old guard were moving, new threats were coming into play and new possibility as well.”

    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

  23. “Yeah, but remember, MI5 is an investigative service and it exists to disrupt threats to the nation's national security, protect its economic well-being. And whilst that's often personified in big state actors and the 10-foot tall China, Russia, you have the list too. It's often closer to home. It's about domestic terrorism. It's about subversion. It's about espionage. And at that point, for the first time, it was also about serious crime. And so that period actually was a really busy period. It was a transitional period. The service took on responsibility for intelligence in Northern Ireland and played a fundamental part in the things that you were central to, Alistair. And of course, at that point, we could start to see Islamist-inspired terrorism coming through too. This was when that phenomenon started to shape. So it was a transitional period. I don't think it was an odd time to join.”

    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

  24. “It wasn't James Bond, but it was fantastic people doing important things that mattered. And 25 years later, I was deputy head of the place and then went to GCH”

    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

  25. “When I applied, I had no idea. More or less when I walked in the door, I had. I had little idea. And it was quite a culture shock, if I'm honest with you, going from very smart offices not far away from here, very modern open plan even then people with laptops, technology everywhere into an environment with yellowing bomb curtains and technology that were definitely felt out of date at that point. It wasn't David Bomb.”

    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

  26. “Well, my boss at that time was Stephen Lander, and before that, Stella Remington, it was around that period. And so I thought, you don't get this chance very often. And so I suddenly found myself going down the intelligence.”

    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

  27. “Well, it's a training to put people off asking you extra questions. My mother always used to say that I sit next to the board, most boring person in the world who's talking about little Johnny, who's a merchant banker, excuse me, merchant bankers. And I have to say you're an accountant. And that usually makes them turn away. So I trained as an accountant. Actually, I really enjoyed that. And I ended up doing some work. This is the end of the 80s, early 90s, some work in government. There was a mini recession. And I found a whole world of challenge and scale that I had no idea about having worked in the private sector with private sector clients. And I thought I'm going to stick around here for a bit. So I applied for a secondment to the Ministry of Defence. And more or less, not quite, but more or less when I turned up, I found out it was MI5. So careers are about serendipity, if you ask me. And that was one of those sliding door moments. And I went into MI5. And after a year,”

    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

  28. “I was an accidental spy, and I went, bore you with all the details, grew up in Hampshire, single mum, three boys, state schools, comprehensive education, sixth form college, and then university read history, mainly because it was five hours a week. And I came out of that thinking, well, what am I going to do with my life? And after a bit of traveling, I decided I better get a proper qualification. I went into the city. I trained as a chartered accountant, which whilst the stereotype has been useful for me in avoiding conversations in my career afterwards, actually I really enjoyed that environment.”

    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