I said that? You got to be joking!
"That was a mistake that we made about Uncle Sam.'' Anybody who wanted to hear that last week from the UNF, saw a lone ranger taking a walk down the parliamentary aisle instead. Had a visitor to the chamber got lost, and ended up in the member's area?

For a while it seemed so, the opposition benches being empty except for a few eager beavers sitting huddled together for support in the JVP area. Anyway the visitor who lost his way turned out to be no visitor at all. This was Puthirasigamani, walking across to the TNA benches to sit with the Tamil MPs because he was "unable to bear the pain'' of sitting with a party that does not feel for the Tamil people "having organised a march on Deepavali day.''

Phew. Puthirasigamani provided some electricity in a game that was so low-wattage that looking at the opposition it appeared as if the UNF had proposed an adjournment debate against itself. Rajitha Senaratne's speech was almost interminable, and it was being speculated whether he thought he was waiting for the moderator to break for an advertisement.

But it was the Speaker, and he didn't have to break for commercials. There were aplenty. Puthirasigamani gave one for himself, saying he started with the UNP, and crossed over to the PA. But he did say something that was perhaps the only profound utterance in a day of hot air over empty benches.

He said "the Tamils have been driven to fear, due to the PA march on Colombo on Deepavali.'' True, and he in turn drove his fellow MPs into fear by crossing over, with all of them taking leave of absence rather than watch Puthirasigamani's performance.

Ranil Wickremesinghe had a good deal of debating society gloss painted onto his being, because he was speaking to an opposition that simply wasn't there -- by and large. He quoted copiously, and he said ''who said this?'' "Kofi Annan, not Ranil Wickremesinghe.''

He said ''it was my father who first went to the United Nations in 1955 when Sri Lanka was being kept out for no reason.'' In the gallery, they were almost expecting him to say ''who said that?'' "Kofi Annan not Ranil Wickremesinghe'' before they realised that Kofi Annan's father must have been somewhere in Africa when Sri Lanka had its struggles with the UN.

Then he said the whole issue about Iraq was one of grammar, not of realpolitik. With his kind of crisp tie and coat manner, we would have thought he had similar ideas with grammar. But this is more debating society than Westminster semantic finesse. "Who said it? Kofi Annan?''

"Who said it? Not Ranil Wickremesinghe?'' Pity he couldn't say “who said "....those of us who feel the United States had no choice but to intervene? Kofi Anan said it, not me.'' Then he deadpanned that he was talking about the structural reforms of the United Nations, and took Iraq only as an example. The JVP didn't seem to be quite comfortable with that, but that apart, it looked as if he was in fact talking about Kofi Annan on Thursday, and took himself only as an example...

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