Mia Mottley Prime minister who cut ties with UK is now on track for top job at UN

Barbados may be a tiny rock in the ocean with a population of just 300,000 people. But prime minister Mia Mottley’s impassioned speeches to the UN and Cop climate change summits have thrust her front and centre of the world stage.

When the next general secretary of the UN is elected in 2026, Ms Mottley, 57, is now the favourite to win. It is the turn of the south Americas and Caribbean to provide the next leader and as it stands there is no viable alternative candidate. On

Wednesday evening at the Kensington Oval cricket ground, near the capital of Bridgetown, Ms Mottley gave a speech without notes that ran for 15 minutes. One friend said afterwards that Ms Mottley had a photographic memory which, coupled with a deep, sonorous voice, makes for compelling listening.

The audience was made up of the greats of West Indies cricket, such as Sir Garfield Sobers, who were there for the launch of a book by fast bowler Sir Wes Hall. There will of course be no more knighthoods awarded in Barbados after Ms Mottley controversially chose to transform the country into a republic without calling a referendum. “We are literally a dying breed,” one knight said at the event.

Ms Motley has a tight grip on power and sources suggest her Cabinet members do little without her say so. She fitted in the book launch between back-to back meetings and took time to be photographed with two children who were each given a copy of the book for their school libraries. “It is important these two children can aspire to the highest office in this country – that of the presidency,” she said.

Ms Mottley was born into Barbadian political royalty. Her grandfather, Ernest Mottley, was the first mayor of Bridgetown and her uncle was leader of a short-lived political party formed in 1975.

Her father, Sir Elliot Motley, was an MP and barrister who became Barbados’s consul-general in New York. Ms Mottley attended the UN’S international school in Manhattan and went on to study law in London, graduating in 1986.

She entered politics and was appointed education minister in 1994, aged just 29, and elected general secretary of the Barbados Labour Party two years later. When Labour lost the 2008 election, Ms Mottley became party leader, was ousted in a coup and then reinstated in 2013. Five years later, she won a landslide election, winning more than 70 per cent of the vote and all 30 seats in the Barbados legislature.

A snap election, post Covid, in January 2022 confirmed her popularity, winning all 30 seats for a second time.

Ms Mottley, who is fiercely private about her personal life, has a deep-seated belief that the West owes the Caribbean islands reparations for the damage caused by slavery and global warming.