Tuesday’s sugar-coating of the unfortunate matter in which former Clerk to the Houses of Parliament Ms Valrie Curtis was reprimanded by Speaker of the House Mrs Juliet Holness offers a stark lesson to leadership: Better to praise in public and punish in private.

It was a thing to behold as members of the Government side poured praises like honey on Ms Curtis — who is now in retirement and absent from the sitting — giving the impression that, after three decades of service, she was the best clerk ever to walk the corridors of any parliament.

However, the kind words that Ms Curtis or any other Jamaican in her position would have wanted to hear were never once uttered in that hypocritical session of the House
— “I am sorry.”

If from no one else, the apology should have come from Mrs Holness, who wrote that infernal letter and delivered the unkindest cut, one week before Ms Curtis retired, accusing her of failing to comply with her ruling on the tabling of reports.

The House Speaker had ruled in November last year that reports from the Auditor General’s Department (AGD) on public bodies would be tabled, in keeping with Section 30 of the Financial Administration and Audit (FAA) Act.

The Speaker’s letter was in relation to the two special audit reports of the Financial Services Commission and Tax Administration Jamaica the AGD had sent to Parliament on December 28, 2023 and January 29 this year, which the Speaker said were received in breach of the ruling she made in the House of Representatives on November 7, 2023.

Instead of doing the right thing, Mrs Holness insisted that the letter to the clerk had not been placed on her personnel file at HR. We are extremely curious to hear where such a consequential letter was filed and how the Speaker came to the conclusion that that would be salve enough for her egregious action.

She went on to make matters worse by suggesting that the only thing wrong was that the letter found itself into the public domain, presumably into the hands of the Opposition.

“Our differences in perspectives on a particular administrative matter and the resulting procedural communication to her was never placed on her HR [human resource] record, but which has unfortunately been circulated in the public domain…” she said

Is that really Mrs Holness’s notion of a private letter? Moreover, any such missive from a Speaker to a clerk must be public property and cannot just be among the two.

The letter was clearly undeserved because she went on to tell the Parliament that “…it is important for me to state that I continue to hold the retired clerk in high regard and acknowledge her contribution… The former clerk has left an indelible mark on the Parliament, and it is our hope that she will enjoy her well-deserved retirement”.

To be fair, one can surmise that Mrs Holness did not know better. We have not heard of her taking any course in speakership and, perhaps like so many before her she, was merely winging it.

We suspect that her husband, Prime Minister Mr Andrew Holness, was walking gingerly between the raindrops when he sided with Mrs Holness on the matter of the public domain, while saying the former clerk enjoyed “the respect, love, and admiration of the Parliament of Jamaica, which she served unreservedly”.

Oh, for a more mature Parliament.