The Cabinet photo where there are more purple ties than non-white faces

Only two people in the new Cabinet are from BAME backgrounds

Photo prompted criticism online

Theresa May's first offical Cabinet photo has been released – and people are pointing out a glaring problem with it.

Only two people in the new Cabinet are from BAME backgrounds: Sajid Javid and Priti Patel.

The criticism was immediate:

... as were the comments about the "right-wing" fashion on show

Around 14 per cent of the UK population is black and minority ethnic, but only 9 per cent of the Cabinet is.

Yet Theresa May has double the number of BAME ministers than her predecessor. In David Cameron's Cabinet, Sajid Javid was the only person who wasn't white.

A report in April demonstrated that only 6 per cent of staff working in the Cabinet office are from BAME backgrounds, making it the least diverse workforce of all the ministerial departments.

But the problem extends beyond the Cabinet. Only 13 out of 46 governmental departments were found to have any BAME ministers or executives.

According to research by UCL and Birkbeck, non-white MPs make up 6 per cent of Parliament, an increase from 4.2 per cent in 2010.

However, diversity campaigners have pointed out the Government is still far from being representative of the UK population.

In 2015, a Government commissioned report revealed that black and Asian civil servants were routinely discriminated against by the "old boys network" in Whitehall.

The study found ethnic minority staff were marked lower in performance reviews and did not always have equal access to promotion.