EDITORIAL: Manners never hurt, Miss Clark

Louis Pierard
FOR reasons that some find inexplicable, we expect our leaders to be role models. A life scrutinised at every turn is one of the burdens of office. Little escapes notice.
Even without the legion of willing accusers and mischief makers sniffing out offence, the merest of actions can drip with significance.
Despite some glaring evidence to the contrary, members of the royal family soon appreciate the sacrifices required of a life constantly in the public eye. One must always be seen to be doing the right thing. And none carries it off as well as the Queen does.
Which makes any infraction of protocol by those who care less about doing the right thing in her presence much more noticeable.
As a dedicated republican, Prime Minister Helen Clark clearly has little time for royalty (though from all accounts she is on cordial terms with Her Majesty). Even so, however repugnant one finds the idea of hereditary accession, the gestures of etiquette are still a necessary obligation.
Miss Clark was accused of insulting the Queen in 2002. She was censured for wearing trousers instead of a gown - a criticism that bordered on pettiness. However, her omission - or refusal - to say grace at the same state banquet for the Queen, who is head of the Church of England, was seen as a calculated slight.
While one has to sympathise with a leader loath to be tarred a hypocrite for the insincerity of empty prayers, there are ways around such details without drawing attention to glaringly antagonistic sentiments.
This week she was castigated by Britain's Daily Express (which modestly calls itself "The World's Greatest Newspaper") for reportedly text messaging during the Queen's opening address to the Commonwealth heads of Government meeting in Kampala last Friday.
Miss Clark, who once described herself as "the mistress of the text message", was doing what drives every teacher mad. No doubt CHOGMs are a mind-numbingly dull and probably pointless ordeal, and thumbing one's way through silent conversation must be a merciful diversion.
Nevertheless, even if Miss Clark thinks (as many of her republican cheerleaders certainly do) that the Queen is irrelevant, a crinkly relic of a defunct empire and that the sooner everyone else ignores her the better, courtesy demands, at the very least, the diplomatic show of respect.
Good manners are reciprocal. "All principle and no decorum" becomes boorishness. And if a head of state can't - or won't - sit up, face the front and pay attention, then why should legions of school children be obliged to?