An Arab woman appears destined to replace the United Nation's British second-in-command after Ban Ki Moon was sworn in yesterday as the new Secretary-General.

Mr Ban said that he would name the new deputy secretary-general to replace Mark Malloch Brown before taking office next month. Aides said that he would appoint a “woman from the south”.

“I am looking at several names with a preference for women candidates,” the former South Korean Foreign Minister told a press conference yesterday. “I will make a choice in due course.”

UN insiders said that the short-list was headed by Rima Khalaf, a former Deputy Prime Minister of Jordan, who served as assistant secretary-general and regional director for Arab states at the UN Development Programme until February this year. She won praise for overseeing the UNDP's Arab development reports, which criticised the policies of Arab governments.

Other finalists include Fayza Abulnaga, Egypt’s Minister for International Co-operation, who has served previously at the UN, and Thoraya Obaid, a Saudi woman who heads the UN Population Fund.

One Western diplomat said yesterday that Mrs Obaid was “by far the most likely” of the names being discussed — even though the United States does not fund her UN agency because of a row over abortion. However, a UN source said it was a “done deal” that Ms Khalaf would win the job.

Under US pressure, Mr Ban is expected to make sweeping changes in the top ranks of the UN secretariat in the wake of the Oil-for-Food scandal.

“One of my core tasks will be to breathe new life and inject renewed confidence into the sometimes weary secretariat,” Mr Ban told the UN General Assembly at yesterday’s swearing-in ceremony. “I will work to enhance morale, professionalism and accountability among staff members, which in turn will help us to serve member states better, and restore trust in the organisation.”

Britain has joined the intense jockeying for position in the new UN administration. Officials say that it put forward Sir John Holmes, the British Ambassador in Paris, who lost out in this week’s Foreign Office reshuffle, as the new chief of the UN’s political affairs department.

Britain also urged Mr Ban to appoint Suma Chakrabarti, the top civil servant at the Department for International Developmen, to a new post of deputy UN secretary-general for development.

UN insiders suggest that Britain might lose out in the hunt for jobs because it was slow to jump aboard Mr Ban’s bandwagon during the new UN chief’s election campaign. Mr Ban has told diplomats that he would name a single deputy secretary-general and his chief of staff before the end of the year. Other top posts, including the under-secretary-general for political affairs, would be announced next month.

The US and France are said to be negotiating directly with each other over which will provide the new head of UN peacekeeping. Diplomats predict that France, which holds the post, will prevail because of the political complications of having an American in charge of the almost 100,000 UN troops around the world.

Mr Ban caused consternation among Francophone diplomats yesterday when he failed to understand and answer a question in French, one of the UN’s two working languages. “If you could speak lentement en français,” he asked his Canadian questioner in a awkward mixture of the two tongues, before replying in English.

Mr Ban was tough, however, in his remarks on Iran, calling Teheran’s denial of the Holocaust unacceptable.

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