I have just returned from CHOGM, the biennial gathering of Commonwealth heads of government and their peripatetic entourages, with an abiding sense of potential not yet realised. Fifty-six countries. Some 2.7 billion people. More than 60 per cent of them aged 29 or under. On paper, few clubs come close.

The steelpan is the Caribbean’s answer to empire. When African drumming was banned in colonial Trinidad in the 1880s, the music did not die. It found other instruments, and by the 1940s it had settled on discarded oil drums, hammered and tuned by hand. The material is scrap. The sound is entirely Caribbean. But a pan is hollow by construction. Struck with intent, it carries a melody across a square. Left on its stand, it is ornament.

Antigua was beautiful: sun, sand, humidity and the occasional washout, both meteorological and institutional. There were steel bands at several of the week’s ceremonies. At one, Andy Burnham picked out a nursery rhyme with the Hell’s Gate Steel Orchestra, and the Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, joined him for a duet. It was charming. It was also diffident: mild-mannered, gentle tapping, two men plainly anxious not to hit a wrong note. Here was the summit in miniature. The instrument was there. The audience was willing. What was missing was anyone prepared to strike it with conviction.

The King put the case as well as anyone. At the dinner he and the Queen hosted for Commonwealth leaders, he called it “one of the world’s more improbable organisations”, and joked that part of his role was to provide an umbrella for us all, a sly nod to the viral footage of him calling for one in Sunday’s downpour. “No treaty compels any of us to be here,” he said. “We come because we choose to.”

That improbability is the Commonwealth’s charm. It is also its impediment. An association spanning Arctic Canada and the Pacific atolls, continental economies and states of a few thousand souls, agrees a great deal in principle and rather less in practice. Consensus among 56 tends towards the anodyne.

“My overall impression was of an institution trudging on: well-meaning, well-networked, and in want of momentum”

This year it was also overshadowed. Reparations dominated the week. The King spoke of his “most profound personal sorrow” at the slave trade. Mr Burnham opened talks on a formal apology, ruled out direct reparations and offered a structured dialogue. Kemi Badenoch called it “another navel-gazing distraction”. The debate deserves serious engagement. But much went unsaid around it, not least what the wider membership, from the Pacific to South Asia, wants the organisation to become.

The policy harvest was modest: a Commonwealth Trade Portal, a US$52 billion pipeline of investment-ready projects, and from Britain £40 million over three years for Caribbean infrastructure, plus two task forces, on critical minerals and trade. Welcome, all of it. Transformative, none of it. My overall impression was of an institution trudging on: well-meaning, well-networked, and in want of momentum.

Compare the United Nations. It is much maligned. It still has teeth. Its blue helmets, whatever their record, live in the public imagination. The Commonwealth has no such emblem. Beyond the Games, most people know it only through its associations with empire, more redcoat than blue helmet: a historical curiosity, not a forward-looking association that gets things done.

The pity is the potential still lying fallow. Trading costs between members are on average 19 per cent lower than with outsiders, yet the Commonwealth negotiates no trade agreements of its own. Its members, from Australia and Canada to Ghana and Zambia, hold a striking share of the critical minerals every major economy now covets. Nor is it yet a place where business comes to do deals. SpaceX was billed as a major sponsor. Starlink was pitched to the more remote members. There was talk of Elon Musk attending. He did not. At the business reception the household names were few; most of the room was smaller firms jostling for scraps at the margins. The Secretariat is adept at the cultural set piece. It ought to be rather more commercially minded: courting serious investors, brokering introductions and giving business a reason to turn up.

“The Commonwealth’s promise remains largely unfulfilled, but it is still worth keeping. Somebody needs to pick up the sticks”

Canada makes the point with clarity. Ottawa is working to loosen its dependence on the United States, which took more than 70 per cent of its goods exports last year. Mark Carney gave Caribbean leaders maple syrup bearing his own brand and more than C$70 million in new investment. The bigger move is towards Brussels, with an associate arrangement with the EU expected by June 2027. When the Commonwealth’s own engagement with the EU came up in Antigua, the answer was disarmingly laconic: “There is none.” The Commonwealth offers Canada friendship. Europe offers it instruments.

Yet countries still want in. Gabon and Togo, with no imperial tie to Britain, joined in 2022. Zimbabwe hopes to return. The Commonwealth has endured. It has grown. It has yet to thrive.

Thriving would not take much. A few deliverables with deadlines. A ministerial council that meets between summits. A dialogue with the EU. A fellowship to draw the brightest young talent of 56 countries into its institutions. And a British government whose enthusiasm for the Commonwealth amounts to more than tokenism: one that treats it as policy rather than protocol.

In a sense the Commonwealth is already a pan yard, the open-air space where a steelband rehearses before Carnival. Anyone may wander in. Players of every size share the same ground. A scratch band can, with practice and a leader with a tune, become an orchestra. But a pan yard exists for the performance.

Can something built on the vestiges of empire thrive? The steelpan suggests it can. The drum was scrap. The music is not. The Commonwealth’s promise remains largely unfulfilled, but it is still worth keeping. Somebody needs to pick up the sticks.

Tristan Breijer is London head of Checkmate Government Relations.