While saying “I understand the strength of the feeling”, the Prime Minister continued to insist that he wanted to “look forward, not to the past”. He added that he wanted to “move forward together on climate resilience, on education, on trade and on growth to better enable us to fight against today’s inequalities”.

Several countries raised the topic of restorative justice during the Friday sessions, which Starmer attended, a person with knowledge of the talks told POLITICO.

Starmer’s press conference ran more than an hour late as deliberations continued on the wording of the summit communiqué.

However Starmer told reporters: “The delay was not about paragraph 22 on reparations; which was locked hours ago.

Earlier on Saturday, Commonwealth leaders selected Ghana’s Foreign Minister Shirley Botchwey as the body’s new secretary-general in an opaque, closed-door, unaided retreat.

Ghana recently hosted a conference on reparations, but Botchwey told a debate hosted by think tank Chatham House last month: “We’ve moved from financial reparations now to justice in terms of what do we get- us for the climate? What do we get in terms of a development cooperation framework?