Protocol and politeness

Melania Trump was observing protocol in Riyadh

Melania Trump’s windswept locks at Riyadh airport prompted a vision of Margaret Thatcher at the same venue but tightly encased in sombre black from head to foot when visiting King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Britain’s £42-billion sale of Tornado fighters was attributed as much to her punctilious observance of Saudi sartorial protocol as to a rumoured multimillion-pound “slush fund” for Saudi royals.
 
Politeness and protocol must not be confused. Politeness is voluntary, protocol compulsory. When an earlier Saudi monarch, King Saud, visited India, British newspapers reported that Jawaharlal Nehru was seen taking quick puffs at his cigarette concealed in a window embrasure like an errant schoolboy before His Majesty’s arrival at the Red Fort reception. Unlike the future Lady Thatcher, Nehru had no commercial axe to grind. But as a gentleman he knew it would have been impolite to blow clouds of smoke in the presence of a guest whose austere religion forbade smoke and drink. For all her faults — and more will be discovered as Congress rule dwindles to a distant memory — his daughter was equally mindful of courtesy. Discarding the fashionable sleeveless blouses she sometimes sported in the West, Indira Gandhi reached Saudi Arabia in sleeves that reached her wrist, sari draped decorously over her head. Aware that Saudi men don’t like contact with unrelated females, she greeted King Khalid with a graceful namaskar.

 
That was politeness. It was also politeness when Queen Victoria (according to an obviously apocryphal tale) picked up her finger bowl and drained its contents because her luncheon guest, an Indian maharaja who had never seen a finger bowl before, had just done exactly that, taking it for a drinking goblet. The considerate queen-empress didn’t want the maharaja to feel ill at ease. But it was protocol when Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur drew her sari over her head and sailed into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot where Queen Elizabeth II refuses to allow uncovered females. Her Highness wouldn’t have been admitted otherwise.

 

When France’s King Louis XVIII memorably said, “Punctuality is the politeness of kings”, he meant that since feudal monarchs were not bound by rules, it was incumbent on them to be voluntarily polite to lesser mortals. Not keeping people waiting is one instance that the successors of kings who haughtily strut today’s political stage can afford to learn. A punctual politician, especially from the ruling party, often seems a contradiction in terms. Ruling party politicians can also get away with berating airline employees with slippers, threatening to send their “boys” to rape the wives and daughters of adversaries, and vowing to “turn India into a Hindu rashtra”.

 
No wonder the aggressively loud-mouthed Donald Trump impresses the Republican Hindu Coalition. He would also be the darling of India’s political class if only he didn’t promise to make it difficult for the Republican Hindu Coalition to import the sons of patriotic Indian VIPs under guise of studying in the US. But despite boasting “I am a big fan of Hindu”, Trump may not have endeared himself to Hindu rashtra patrons last week by flamboyantly hobnobbing with West Asia’s Islamic potentates. Yet, Islamic rulers can be polite beyond the call of protocol. When an American visitor expressed surprise at a beggar addressing Saudi Arabia’s legendary founder, King Ibn Saud, as “O Brother!”, His Majesty replied, “A man only honours me by calling me his mother’s son.”

 
Not that either Trump or his Yugoslavia-born third wife, who still looks like the fashion model she was, is likely to have much appreciation of such nuanced niceties. Melania Trump showed the Vatican she can fall in line when self-interest demands: the “disgraceful” (to quote her husband) Pope Francis would not have shaken her hand or even admitted her to his presence without the black lace over her blonde head. King Salman was probably too flattered to be the Trumps’ first foreign host to insist on protocol. Shrewd bargainers themselves, the Arabs must also have noted that nothing would give greater satisfaction to Trump than his wife not just upstaging Lady Thatcher but establishing her superiority over his predecessor’s wife. True, Michelle Obama didn’t cover her head either. But the king himself didn’t receive the Obamas at the airport as he did the Trumps. Nor did their visit produce the biggest-ever single defence sale — $110 billion — in US history.

 
Trump might gladly have swathed his wife in black from top to toe if the Saudis had doubled their purchase. That’s what protocol is all about. Politeness seeks no reward.