In 1969, the late Queen’s chief financial manager, Lord Tryon, told a Home Office civil servant that “it was not, in fact, the practice to appoint coloured immigrants or foreigners” to certain roles within the royal household. People from ethnic minority backgrounds were, however, allowed to work as domestic servants.
The note was sent two months before Queen Elizabeth II invested her son Charles as the Prince of Wales. The UK’s rapid social and political change in the half-century that followed is best described with the official pronouncement made on Tuesday: Charles, now king, received the Tory leader, Rishi Sunak, a British South Asian and practising Hindu, to form a government and become Britain’s 57th prime minister.
