Engaging with Foucault and Power
Michelle Haslem’s PhD thesis, titled Familial Politics and the Stuart Court Masque, was submitted in August 1999, by which time it appears she had already joined MI6. Was her subsequent career a radical break from her interests in gender studies and literary theory? Or are there things we can learn from reading it in the light of her subsequent leading role in the abuses and terror inflicted by MI6 in the quarter-century after 1998?
Her thesis challenges monarch-centred theories of power by examining the Stuart Court. These were advanced in the so-called ‘New Historicist’ readings of Stuart Court masques (performances put on for the monarch) and Shakespeare’s The Tempest by highlighting how familial politics and other voices disrupt, rather than solely support, the sovereign’s power. By focusing on agency within performances at Court, it argues that power is a contested, non-monolithic force, effectively employing post-structuralist and gender-focused perspectives to show how marginalised figures like Queen Anne challenge patriarchal authority and create openings for audience resistance.
The New Historicism, which Haslem criticised, is totalising in its view of power. Heavily influenced by French philosopher and anti-Marxist Michel Foucault’s model of power, it treats power not as a top-down authority, but as a pervasive, inescapable network that dictates all knowledge and social practice. Haslem criticises New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt (she never cites Foucault) who are said to argue that any apparent act of subversion, rebellion, or resistance within a text or culture has actually been pre-authorised and ‘contained’ by the dominant power structure to reinforce its own stability. This means true political agency or exteriority to power is virtually impossible. Haslem’s thesis attacks this, but she does not break from Foucauldian notions of power. The thesis pushes back against a specific strain of that framework. It uses post-structuralist tools to critique a specific Foucauldian trap within New Historicism. It argues that power is a messy, multi-sided negotiation, rather than a one-way street dominated by the monarch.
When you look at this through the lens of a senior British intelligence operative in counter-terrorism (MI6) who claims to be a “passionate advocate” for EDI while steering institutional Islamophobia, the 1999 thesis reads almost like a blueprint for the exact brand of neocolonial counter-insurgency and statecraft that has defined the last three decades.
The intersection of Haslem’s academic argument, her state power, and her internal contradictions reveals four distinct connections, which are summarised below.
1. EDI as the New Court Masque
In her thesis, Haslem notes how King James used the court masque to “aestheticise his power as a beneficent and creative act” in order to hide real violence, such as the colonisation of Ireland. It should be noted, however, that this former Catholic grammar schoolgirl of Irish heritage never refers directly to the colonisation of Ireland in the thesis. In her MI6 career, EDI is her modern-day court masque. Advancing women or championing gender equality within the intelligence apparatus functions as a cosmetic ‘mystification’ of state power. It wraps an inherently violent, surveillance-heavy, and Islamophobic state agency in the progressive language of liberation.
2. The Weaponisation of Imperial Feminism
Haslem’s thesis focuses heavily on how Queen Anne used her female body and performance to challenge the king. This mirrors the logic of imperial feminism. In British counter-terrorism, gender equality is weaponised to justify aggressive foreign and domestic security policies. This helps create the ideological justification to target Muslim communities. The framework paints Islamic cultures as uniquely backward, patriarchal, or dangerous, thereby legitimising structural Islamophobia and MI6’s surveillance state under the guise of ‘protection’.
3. Co-opting ‘Other Voices’ for Surveillance and Propaganda
The thesis champions the idea of an uncontrollable, active audience. When the author writes about The Tempest’s “banquet of harpies” failing to make the sinners feel remorse, she explicitly states:
… spectacles, even those produced by the state, could be interpreted in any of a number of ways. Even when stagecraft and statecraft are in collusion, the creator, be it King or masque-writer, cannot control the response of the audience.
This is a textbook expression of the ‘active audience’ theory popular in literary theory, media, and cultural studies in the 1990s and beyond. She is arguing that the audience has the power to decode, resist, and re/misinterpret state propaganda. She uses this ‘active audience’ concept to escape Foucault’s trap of total state control.
In theory, Haslem’s thesis celebrates the ‘active audience’ and ‘other voices’ of women, such as Queen Anne, or colonial subjects like Caliban — the indigenous central character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest — as sites of freedom and democratisation that the monarch cannot control. “My own project”, she writes, “constitutes an attempt to [develop] a model which finds room for oppositional forces”.
In practice, in her MI6 career, Haslem recognises that audiences and marginalised groups, which are ‘active’ and uncontrollable, pose a direct threat to the state. Therefore, counter-terrorism policy (like Prevent, of which she is now in charge as Director General of the Homeland Security Group) cannot rely on simple, top-down propaganda. The state must step in to map, monitor, and manage those ‘active’ responses. This is, of course, precisely what the covert propaganda unit in the Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) does, as I have shown. She is presently commanding that unit, which sits beneath Prevent in the Home Office hierarchy. We can also note the irony that Haslem advertises that she is the Home Office Ethics Adviser while simultaneously overseeing what is probably the least ethical part of the Home Office.
In British counter-terrorism policy (specifically frameworks like Prevent), ‘listening to other voices’ within Muslim communities was never about democratisation. It was a targeted intelligence-gathering and subversion strategy. By mapping out the internal factions, ‘familial politics’, and distinct elements within the community, the state learns exactly who can be co-opted — to become the state’s favourite Muslims — and who must be neutralised.
4. Directing the ‘Spectacle’ of the Enemy
If power is not an abstract, inescapable web, then it is an intentional, targeted mechanism wielded by specific actors. In her thesis, Haslem shows understanding that the “creator … cannot control the response of the audience”. Therefore, intelligence operatives do not try to project a flawless image of absolute power. Instead, they engineer controlled friction. They allow, or better cultivate, anti-Muslim rhetoric, fearmongering, and securitised ‘crisis’ narratives to circulate in the public space. This intentionally shapes public anxieties and helps keep the population dependent on the security state.
While the brutal reality of Michelle Haslem’s trajectory cannot be predicted directly from her thesis, it is perhaps appropriate to note that ‘freedom from the monarch’ becomes effectively an interrogation of how a ruling class survives when its authority is challenged. She took the lessons of the Jacobean court — that raw autocracy fails, and that you must manage diversity, absorb factions, and perform benevolence — and successfully applied them to the preservation of the modern British security state.
As I have been arguing for over a quarter of a century, the ‘active audience’ theory is an illusion. Audience response is not some magical, free-floating space of resistance. In the real world, ‘active responses’ are heavily conditioned by material conditions, media ownership, class, and state intervention, including most notably propaganda.
From believing in the ‘active audience’ during her academic years, Haslem apparently became highly attuned to the fact that the state must actively manage how people interpret events. When she transitioned into British intelligence, she did not leave ‘other voices’ alone to be free; she has used the state’s immense resources to police, surveil, and structure those voices so they could never mount a real defence against anti-Muslim policies.
The thesis claims the audience is free; her career is, and has been, dedicated to making sure they never could be.
EDI and the Neutering of Anti-racism
Haslem’s commitment to EDI is a mark of how far the EDI discourse has contaminated and neutered genuine anti-racist struggles. Here is a very senior spook claiming to be a “passionate advocate” of EDI who at the same time waxes lyrical in her interview with Civil Service World about how touched she was to witness the struggle of the Ukrainian regime: “I’m really proud of what the UK Government is doing in Ukraine”. She notes she has visited Kyiv and has heard from “Ukrainian counterparts” — specifically the Banderite, Nazi-aligned Ukrainian intelligence services — which “was a high point of my career, humbling and moving”.