Britain's new head of MI6 (aka C) is set to give Russia's President Putin a real case of the hiwi-jeebies...

With a grandfather straight out of a Sven Hassel novel, MI6 watchers are wondering how Ms Metreweli will make her mark on the service - uniforms by Hugo Boss, a torchlight parade along Vauxhall Bridge, a Leni Riefenstahl revival at the South Bank BFI perhaps?

The Daily Mail tried manfully to frame it all as a dastardly Russian propaganda plot to smear the 'brilliant' and 'fiercely intelligent' new head of MI6, who grew up in a 'multilingual' home and apparently knew nothing about her grandfather's shenanigans on the Eastern front that were extensively documented by the Nazis.

But really it's all rather tawdry.

The whole thing leaves the impression of a ghastly own-goal by the UK's top spymasters - 'Bit of a stinker old boy' as Terry Thomas or indeed Grant (Robert Shaw) in From Russia with Love (1963) might have said - who have played straight into Russia's Ukrainian Nazis narrative.

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14851451/grandfather-new-head-MI6-Nazi-spy-chief.html]

Undoubtedly a few memos have already gone out to Zelensky's regime not to talk up the new chief to avoid too much 'blowback'.

The most obvious concern though is how MI6 vetting could have ignored all this when she was originally recruited ... unless of course there is some other rather more obvious explanation that involved MI6 doing some truly 'wicked' things as Control (Cyril Cusack) so nicely put it to Leamas (Richard Burton) over tea in the movie The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965).

Oh what tangled webs these spooks weave.