Early in her career at the UK’s domestic security agency, Manningham-Buller fought for the same opportunities afforded to her male colleagues. Ultimately, her grit and talent saw her go all the way to the top
Eliza Manningham-Buller joined MI5 in an era when the Cold War was rumbling on, migration was low, and Britain’s domestic security service kept special kettles for steaming open letters.
The idea that this highly secretive, male-dominated organisation could ever be led by a woman was inconceivable. After all, less than 20 years before Manningham-Buller arrived, MI5’s former boss Dick White had claimed: “Our secretaries only need two things: good legs, and a good upbringing.”
It was a career that Manningham-Buller “fell into really by chance”, she recalled in 2024, during a rare interview. “I saw somebody at a drinks party when I was unemployed and he said, ‘What are you thinking of doing?’ And I was rather sort of vague. And the next thing I knew I was going to Room 055 in the Old War Office building.”
The year was 1974. After being interviewed by a “fairly anonymous man”, Manningham-Buller found she had joined an organisation about whose exact purpose she was still unclear. She thought it was “an independent wing of the MoD” which, of course, it wasn’t.
Nevertheless she stayed, despite the Security Service’s quite shocking sexism – which nearly caused her to hand in her notice.
“There were a whole lot of things you were not thought suitable to do,” Manningham-Buller said when she delivered the Reith Lectures in 2011. “I didn’t realise this to begin with, and when I did, I and a lot of other women officers were extremely cross about it and fought to be allowed to do all the jobs available.”
The fight paid off. Things changed – gradually – and the interesting roles began to present themselves.
Although her career would focus mainly on counter-terrorism, in the early 1980s Manningham-Buller honed her skills in counter-intelligence and was one of only five officers entrusted with the knowledge that the KGB’s deputy head in London, Oleg Gordievsky, was in fact a double agent working for Britain. Gordievsky would later say that her discretion saved his life.
She went on to lead MI5’s inquiry into the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in British history. Soon after, she was posted to Washington as MI5’s senior liaison to the US intelligence community during the first Gulf War. On her return to the UK in 1992, Manningham-Buller was handed a newly-created unit and a sensitive mission: to take the lead against Irish republican terrorism on the British mainland, a structural change which decisively moved MI5 onto ground long held by the police.
Recognition of her operational and strategic talent saw her appointed onto the Security Service’s management board in 1993, and then in 1997 as MI5’s deputy director general, with responsibility for the organisation’s day-to-day operations.
Her ascent to the very top job of director general – in October 2002 – saw her step into one of the most exacting roles in public life at a moment of severe national vulnerability. The September 11 attacks had redrawn the global security landscape, and Britain’s domestic intelligence service was under unprecedented pressure to adapt – a period Manningham-Buller shed light on in her second Reith Lecture.
“We felt almost swamped, certainly inundated with leads to plots, by the rich plethora of incomplete intelligence, sometimes fragmentary, sometimes false, often contradictory, to be analysed, assessed and developed until action could be taken,” she said.
“No sooner had we resolved one plot, then several more emerged. Indeed they proliferated, partly because of our involvement in Iraq. We had to juggle resources and make excruciating choices on what to pursue. Excessive hours were worked as we struggled to understand the scale of what we were facing.”
It was this new, post-9/11 environment and the sheer pressure it was placing on MI5 that led the government to agree, in 2003, to a huge increase in the organisation’s budget, triggering a period of significant recruitment. Reflecting on that time of expansion during a podcast appearance in 2024, Manningham-Buller spoke about the importance of organisations listening to new recruits “before they become institutionalised”.
“I always used to encourage arrivals to challenge – to say: ‘Why are we doing this? Why are we doing it this way? Have we thought about what if…?’” she said, adding that, in her experience, some of the best ideas came from the most junior staff, rather than the “old lags” who insisted: “We’ve always done it like this.”
But her tenure was shaped not only by renewal and growth, but by a moment of acute crisis in the form of the 7 July 2005 London bombings. She would go on to express deep regret that MI5 was unable to prevent the attacks.
After 33 years’ service, Manningham‑Buller left MI5 in 2007 and moved into a more visible role in the UK’s public life. She joined the House of Lords as a crossbencher in 2008, from where she has been an influential voice on civil liberties, intelligence oversight and national security, and she chaired the Wellcome Trust (from 2015 to 2021), overseeing one of the world’s largest medical research charities during a period that included preparations for – and early responses to – a global pandemic.
In 2024, her place at the heart of the British establishment was further underscored when King Charles III appointed her the first female Chancellor of the Order of the Garter since the office's inception in 1475.
Publicly available details about Manningham-Buller’s personal life are unsurprisingly scant but we do know that she got married in 1991 aged 43 and that – on account of her husband’s five children from his previous marriage – joined a ready-made family.
These days she frequently cites her 16 step-grandchildren, particularly when discussing sustainability. In that same podcast appearance where she stressed the importance of organisations listening to their young employees, she expressed her fears that society is failing to take the necessary actions to keep the planet liveable and said that her step-grandchildren see the future of the planet as their single biggest worry.
As for the fictional representations of those in her former profession, it’s clear she has little time for them. “There's no question of Aston Martins,” she has said, alluding to James Bond. “You're on a Santander bicycle if you're lucky.” She gave her verdict on Spooks to Desert Island Discs, when she was its castaway in 2007: “Everything is solved by half a dozen people who break endless laws to achieve their results… I did watch it at the beginning but when the female officer was dropped into the vat of boiling oil in the first series I thought, ‘I cannot bear this’.”
And what of Slow Horses, the popular spy show du jour? Well, we may never know what Manningham-Buller thinks of Diana Taverner, the suave and ruthless MI5 boss portrayed by Kristin Scott Thomas. This is because Taverner’s onetime real-life counterpart claims never to have seen it.