The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council’s 47-page opinion that Ms Priya Levers be removed from the bench of the Grand Court of Cayman for inexcusable misconduct is a scandalous, disheartening read.

Nevertheless all leaders, especially our own, should go to the Privy Council’s website and read it, if only to brief themselves.

For when a leader deteriorates to the stage where his or her ability to objectively discern between right and wrong vanishes, it is only a matter of time before the whole deck of cards comes crashing down.

No matter how impressive one’s track record is, or in the case of Ms Levers, how high the regard of one’s peers, bad manners and bad behaviour will never trump the universal tenets of good governance. Fairness, transparency and dispassionate judgment are but some of the essential qualities on which sustainable leadership is premised. These qualities cannot be subject to the peculiarities of culture or dispensed with according to the idiosyncrasies of any given individual.

That’s why Ms Levers, a Sri Lankan who married a Jamaican and practised law for 27 years at the local bar before moving to Grand Cayman, will never again sit as a judge, at least in Cayman. Her behaviour — which she was tragically unable to see anything wrong with — was deemed by the Judicial Committee to have fallen so far short of the standard set by the Bangalore principles of Judicial Conduct, as to remove any question of her professional redemption.

We note Ms Levers’ scathing observations that our local prisons are so filthy and disgusting that their doors are indistinguishable from the vast armies of cockroaches that inhabit them; or that some of our women make careers out of reproducing children for men whom they have no interest in, solely for the purpose of providing a ticket to a better life in a another country; or that there is a tendency among many black men to neglect their familial responsibilities. These remarks were not necessarily unwarranted, in our view.

However, the fatal flaw that Ms Levers made on several occasions while sitting on the bench was to advance these observations in a manner that, in the words of the Privy Council’s Lord Phillips, gave “the appearance of racism, bias against foreigners and bias in favour of the defence in criminal cases”.

We have more than enough local, ongoing drama to fuel many analogies.

There are, despite the spirited effort on the part of some to pretend otherwise, many strings hanging from the past 12 or so months that are begging to be tied up as a precursor to moving on.

Entities like the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) are patiently waiting to get back into the water, just as soon as the Government, through the vehicle of frank disclosure, guarantees safety.

In the meantime, we wait in the hope that the tragic example set by Ms Levers will not, like those hapless seeds of biblical fame, fall on rocky ground.