Truss is set to name James Cleverly as foreign secretary, Suella Braverman — whose parents came to Britain in the 1960s from Kenya and Mauritius — as home secretary, and Kwasi Kwarteng as the country’s first Black chancellor of the exchequer, or finance chief, British media outlets reported.

Cleverly, whose mother hails from Sierra Leone — his father is from Wiltshire, about 90 miles outside London — has spoken publicly about being bullied as a mixed-race child and has given talks at Conservative Party conferences about how the party can win the support of Black voters. Kwarteng, whose parents migrated to Britain from Ghana, wrote a book examining the British Empire’s rule in the former colonies of Iraq, Kashmir, Myanmar, Sudan, Nigeria and Hong Kong.

The diversity of Truss’s ministerial appointments won praise from some quarters, in a nation where Conservative Party members — about 0.3 percent of Britain’s population — are generally older, wealthier, 95 percent White and politically further to the right than Britain as a whole. (Nearly 85 percent of people living in England and Wales identify as White, government data shows.)

“The new cabinet is another reminder that people from all backgrounds can go far within the Tory party,” Samuel Kasumu, a former race affairs adviser to Johnson, told the Guardian newspaper.

Not everyone appeared convinced. A headline in Britain’s right-wing Daily Mail tabloid declared ruefully: “Liz Truss puts finishing touches to diverse new government: No place for white men in great offices of state.”

Her predecessor, Johnson, also had a fairly diverse senior ministerial lineup. Home Secretary Priti Patel was the first British member of Parliament of Indian origin to take up that appointment, while the three chancellors during Johnson’s premiership included two men of South Asian origin and one of Kurdish background. Truss was Johnson’s foreign secretary.

Poster Comment:

African woman to replace Asian woman who replaced Asian man as Home Secretary (head of UK police.)