If all goes to plan, at some stage in the coming weeks 15 diplomats will emerge from a small sound-proofed room deep in the bowels of the United Nations headquarters in New York and announce the organisation’s next secretary-general.

The person they choose will face a combination of challenges unlike any that their predecessors have had to deal with. Two of the security council’s permanent members, the US and Russia, are engaged in wars of choice that have no end in sight. A UN commission of inquiry has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, but the UN has effectively been reduced to the role of bystander, pushed out by Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. The climate crisis is creating a cascade of new humanitarian disasters, while every day now seems to bring a new security threat caused by the unregulated rise of AI.

All of this is happening in a world in which the very principles of the UN – multilateralism, a rules-based order and international law – are under threat.

Secretary-general elections have rarely been this consequential and conversations about who should win will dominate the sidelines of the UN general assembly this week and next, as world leaders gather for the annual summit.

The UN, and the world it speaks for, desperately needs a new leader who is both charismatic and competent. Yet the five permanent members of the security council – the US, UK, France, Russia and China – hold a veto. Anyone who wants the job will need the approval of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and, most importantly, Trump.

It is not easy to argue you are best placed to save the UN when the man you need to persuade would rather it fails.

Three informal straw polls have taken place so far and no frontrunner has emerged, indeed opposition to the two leading candidates rose in last Friday’s vote. For the........

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