In 1954, during lunch at Chequers with the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Hugh Foot, Churchill expressed his concern that if West Indian migration continued ‘we would have a magpie society: that would never do’.23 A year later Harold Macmillan reported in his diary, with some incredulity, that Churchill thought ‘Keep Britain White’ might make an appropriate slogan with which to fight the upcoming election.24 In the aftermath of the Second World War such appeals to racial sentiment were widely regarded as unacceptable.
