THE big picture is important, obviously, but it’s always the finer details that live long in the public imagination. The little things are the things that catch the eye and are often the easiest to get right.

So why was Liz Truss allowed to greet the new King like a malfunctioning puppet?

Someone in government, surely, must be well practised in the art of the curtsey. We’ve endured the sight of Theresa May plummeting to earth with legs like a pulled wishbone every time occasion called for the act.

Someone might have stepped in to make sure Truss did a few practice runs in a side room before her big moment.

Curtseying isn’t that tough, despite May and Truss’s best efforts to make the manoeuvre look so. Little girls learn it as a routine part of ballet class. Reverence, we call it, two elegant sweeps left and right at the end of class to thank the teacher and pianist. Truss could have popped along to her local dance school for a quick lesson. No one would have forced a tutu on her.

Instead, the woman who brought us pork markets is yet again a meme. The one of her bobbing to header a Photoshopped football is my favourite.

But why curtsey at all? It’s a strange custom with far too great, as our prime ministers demonstrate, a room for error.

The chaps have it easiest. Custom dictates a bow from the neck. You never see the gents getting this wrong. No memes exist of male politicians hingeing from the waist when they should be merely bobbing their head.

Not even Jacob Rees-Mogg, never one for restraint when it comes to matters of etiquette.

Nor Boris Johnson who must be livid to be missing out on all the ceremonial festivities. He would have flourished this week. Or, used this week for an endless series of verbose flourishes.

Video footage of a startingly young Truss – some people look like they came middle aged from the womb – surfaced this week calling for the abolition of the monarchy. Yet now it’s occupationally useful, she’s oozing deference.

Perhaps this week isn’t the week for breaking custom and distracting from the issues at hand. Perhaps it is, though. Prince Charles is reportedly to bring us a modernised and slimmed down monarchy.

Why, if that is the case, should the curtsey be preserved? Deference is polite, mannerly, yes. An elected head of state – no matter how you feel about the manner of that election – bowing to a ceremonial head of state is a curious thing.

Who is dominant here, and who submissive – those who have earned their place or those who have had the mere fortune to be born to it?

The Palace has long since updated its etiquette guide to make the acts of bowing and curtseying optional. We are at such a point of monarchical weirdness, however, that the new prime minister failing to curtsey to the new king would have made headlines, at least in certain sections of the press, and would have been a diverting talking point.

A curtsey and a bow are small things but they are symbolic and they speak to respect for the order of things. It’s hard to respect an order of hierarchy that sees a politician genuflect to a peer in a ceremonial position.

It’s even stranger among the younger royals. There isn’t such a great age gap between Liz Truss and Prince William. How odd it is to see her bow to someone junior in age but then, deference based only on age is weird too.

In modernising the royal family a simultaneous maturity in attitude towards them should follow. Ridding the need for politicians to bow and scrape is one small but easy step.

Anyway, we live now in the land of the unisex and the home of the gender-free. At the very least, couldn’t we leave curtseying for those who can manage it elegantly and see everyone else, those who feel they really must, do a subtle bow?