A diktat circulated by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, this week ordered a “return to tradition” by all US diplomatic posts.

The font had been ditched in 2023 in favour of Calibri, a sans-serif font which officials said was more easily read by people with certain disabilities.

Mr Rubio has abolished the State Department’s office of diversity and inclusion and sought to reverse its initiatives, which he has condemned as “illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful”, The New York Times reports.

He said returning to Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work”.

The switch to Calibri “achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence”, he added.

His memo to diplomatic posts also expounded on the Roman origins of serif fonts, echoing an earlier executive order from Donald Trump which said government architecture needed to “visually connect our contemporary republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity”.