King George V has a personal French chef who arrives with a large retinue in the movie to cook and serve the King and Queen, who are visiting. It seems odd to me that the King of England would have as his personal chef someone from another country... wouldn't there be a scandal? I'd expect the King and Queen to only use the very best British chefs.
So I guess my question is, did British Royalty commonly use non-British personal chefs for their meals, and if so, did anyone, from folks in Parliament down to the average British citizen, ever care?
By the time of King George V's rule it was already quite established among the English monarchy to have foreign chefs and so it would not have been particularly shocking to the British people if George V had one. Edward VII for example was well-established francophile and bon vivant who adored Auguste Escoffier's cooking as well as French cuisine as a whole. Dirty Bertie as some called him was known to have frequented the Savoy and later the Ritz to partake of Escoffier's cooking (though fear of blackmail may also have played a part.) Under Victoria, Alexis Soyer (French) and Charle Elme Francatelli (British born, French trained, Italian extraction) both played big roles in the culinary public life of the empire with the latter becoming chief cook to Queen Victoria and the former being a celebrity chef who cooked for the famous Reform Club.
This was a period where there was a somewhat bizarre tie between nationalism and profession in the hospitality industry where French chefs were deemed to be best but in a similar vein Italian waiters might be fashionable and German or Swiss-German Maitre d'Hotes deemed to be the the top of the trade. Especially at the height of the British Empire I would not see it as being particularly upsetting to much of the British populace that the chef to the king would be French. Rather, and this is a hypothesis based in notions of empire and class which floated about at the time, having a French chef would likely have been interpreted as a sign of his class, good taste and ultimately a nod to the fact that the Empire was so powerful that it could even poach the best cooks that other rival empires produced. Of course some people would no doubt have liked to see a British chef at the reins but we do have to remember that these were different times when first of all, most people thought that the French were simply the best in the world at gastronomy and second; people were not quite as obsessed with chefs as we are today.
Hope this answered your question somewhat! Should you like to do some further reading on the topic I'd suggest:
On French chefs in the UK:
Cowen, Ruth (2006). Relish: the Extraordinary Life of Alexis Soyer, Victorian Celebrity Chef. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Escoffier, A. Auguste Escoffier, Memories of My Life. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1997.
Ritz, Marie Louise. César Ritz: Host to the World. Philadelphia; New York; Toronto: J. B. Lippincott, 1938.
On constructing narratives of French gastronomic hegemony:
Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. Accounting for Taste the Triumph of French Cuisine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Spang, Rebecca L. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Trubek, Amy B. Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.