PoC

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The government is to discuss contingency plans for upcoming strikes, including using the military and civil servants to cover Border Force staff, at an emergency Cobra meeting later.

The armed forces will also be deployed to hospital trusts ahead of an ambulance strike, the government says.

But industrial action is still expected to cause major disruption.

Cobra is an emergency response committee made up of ministers, civil servants and others.

It comes amid a wave of strikes over pay this month from nurses, paramedics, rail workers, and Border Force staff.

Cabinet Office minister Oliver Dowden, who will chair the meeting on Monday, has urged unions to call off the “damaging” strikes.

“The stance the unions have taken will cause disruption for millions of hardworking people over the coming weeks,” he said.

“The government will do all it can to mitigate the impact of this action, but the only way to stop the disruption completely is for union bosses to get back round the table and call off these damaging strikes.

“I will be chairing a series of Cobra meetings over the coming weeks to ensure our plans are as robust as possible, and that disruption is kept to a minimum.”

Trade unions are calling for higher pay rises to help their members cope with rising prices.

Downing Street has continued to stress the importance of the independent pay review boards, whose advice on pay levels it accepted earlier this year.

No 10 has also said the prime minister and chancellor do not want to stoke inflation further.

Border Force officers employed by the Home Office are set to walk out at Gatwick, Heathrow, Manchester, Birmingham and Cardiff airports for eight days from 23 December to New Year’s Eve.

Members of The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) – who represent 75% of all passport control staff – voted to take action in support of a 10% pay rise which they say will help border workers who are “struggling with the cost-of-living crisis”.

Some military personnel are already being trained up as part of contingency planning in a bid to avoid widespread travel disruption at Christmas.

While armed forces will be sent to hospital trusts to familiarise themselves with vehicles ahead of an ambulance worker strike on 21 December.

Paramedics and control room staff will walk out in coordinated strike action by the three main ambulance unions – Unison, GMB and Unite – in a dispute over pay. The action will affect non-life threatening calls only.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has also previously pledged to introduce “new tough” anti-strike laws.

But some of the unions have said instead of meeting each other, ministers should meet them and negotiate pay – arguing wage offers are not enough to keep up with the rising cost of living.

Pat Cullen, head of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) union, had said strikes due to take place this week could be paused if the health secretary “seriously” negotiated over pay.

Health Secretary Steve Barclay told BBC Breakfast he was “very happy to talk” to nurses’ unions but that it was “important both sides respect” the pay offer made to NHS staff.

“We have engaged with them and we continue to be willing to do so,” he said, but added that the government had “honoured in full” the recommendation of the independent pay review body.

He added that he did not want to divert money away from clearing the post-Covid backlog to fund additional pay.

Speaking to LBC, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer accused the government of “sitting on their hands”.

The nurses’ union have called for their members to be given a pay rise of 5% above the RPI inflation rate, which in October was 14.2%.

Sir Keir said he thought that was “more than can be afforded by the government” but said he would “get around the table” to negotiate.

Unison’s head of health Sara Gorton said: “The wage rise given to health workers this year simply hasn’t been enough to stop staff leaving in droves. Without enough employees in the NHS, patients will go on waiting too long for ambulances and for treatment to start.

“Instead of putting plans in place for the strike days, ministers should be concentrating all their efforts on ending the disputes,” she added.

My journey to the school for spies starts in the half-light of a waking city. I do not know where I am going and have only been instructed to meet my contact at a central London landmark. We travel by car, boat and train to a place where officers of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, the overseas espionage agency known as SIS, learn their craft. I am not allowed to describe it to you, but I can tell you this: it is giant and austere and the slicing wind makes my eyes water.

At the door, I am met by a small, cheerful woman with short, wavy blonde hair whose beaming welcome is at odds with the sterile eeriness of this place. Kathy, who is in charge of all intelligence operations by SIS officers and their agents around the world, ushers me over to a bank of armchairs next to a large window overlooking a paved landscape. She jokes that when she was first offered a job at the agency, also known as MI6, her mother questioned whether she wanted to commit herself to something so “wacky and unfamiliar”. “My dad just said, ‘Go for it.’” This self-effacing northerner says she is “not particularly brave”. But she is one of the most powerful spies in Britain. Kathy is one of four directors-general at SIS, each of whom reports to the chief, known as “C”.

For the first time, three of them are women. They work in the most important and rapidly evolving areas of spycraft. Kathy is director of operations. Rebecca is the chief’s deputy, who oversees strategy. The most storied MI6 job of all belongs to Ada, who is the head of technology, known as “Q” after James Bond’s mastermind gadgeteer. I have spent six months interviewing them about how they reached the top in a traditionally male career and trying to understand what the life of a female spy is really like. Since the chief of MI6 is the only member of the agency who is named or permitted to speak in public, and because all of them have been men, this is the first time that female SIS officers have ever spoken on the record. I have agreed to change their names and omit certain details to protect them and the sources they work with.

They agreed to speak to encourage women applicants and correct the perception of espionage as a man’s game. About the photographs: Eliza Bourner is a London-based photographer whose work creates richly cinematic psychological landscapes. For this issue, FT Weekend Magazine invited her to visualise scenes that reflect aspects of this article. These photographs do not contain individuals working in British intelligence or document MI6 equipment and locations. © Eliza Bourner The low profile of these three senior officers is in keeping with the history of women in British intelligence. In the past, women have been overlooked, relegated to secretarial roles or, before the SIS era, deployed as “honeytraps” to ensnare or blackmail enemies.

When Vernon Kell co-founded MI6’s precursor in 1909, he identified as his ideal recruits men “who could make notes on their shirt cuff while riding on horseback”. His views on women were less well-known, but it is said that he once commented: “I like my girls to have good legs.” Despite having proved themselves with significant skill and bravery during the second world war, women in MI6 and its sister agency MI5 struggled to progress and were not regularly recruited as intelligence officers until the late 1970s. This misogyny was repeated and exaggerated in popular novels written by former spies such as Ian Fleming and John le Carré. The fictional MI6 officer James Bond gropes his secretary, spices his operations with extravagant liaisons and encounters few female spies, the most famous being the dowdy Russian counter-intelligence officer Rosa Klebb. Film versions of Fleming’s books made famous an entire genre of “Bond girls”, conquests rather than fully drawn human beings. Le Carré, best known for the cold war spy chronicles starring a gnomic intelligence officer, George Smiley, expresses a similarly two-dimensional view. His women are sirens who exert a potent sexual hold over male protagonists but have little to say for themselves.

The one exception, “Moscow-gazer” Connie Sachs, is a caricature in the opposite direction — an eccentric with an encyclopedic memory who succumbs to alcoholism after being sidelined from the job at which she excels. Sexist depictions are hardly confined to spy films, but they matter more in a profession in which mystery is encouraged and reality is classified. The perceptions built up through cultural references are, like so many aspects of the Bond legacy, double-edged. The films have built SIS a legendary brand, but their portrayal of ad-hoc killings and solo operations is far from accurate. For MI6, the historical absence of women is both a serious omission and a secret weapon. The UK’s main adversaries today — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — are repressive societies with few women in positions of power. For the female spy, this weakness in the enemy is exploitable. Precisely because they are so likely to be overlooked, women have the potential to be the best spies of all.