Patten never hears these things at Oxford?
Chris Patten cut a figure when he leant with some panache onto the lectern. He was talking of conflict resolution, but in his breezy manner, he could well have been talking 'on being Chris Patten.'' Patten was not introduced. He knew that he was too well known in these parts for that. As far as he was concerned, he may as well have been in Bath, his former constituency.

He leant lightly on the lectern just enough to hide his paunch. Not intentional we are sure -- when he says himself that the makers of his effigy have portrayed him in a flattering light. Then he says two of his best friends were killed this year, and that he is in some kind of depression about these deaths.

He says, it is a year of gloom in personal terms -- because of the deaths of the Swedish Foreign Minister and another diplomat who was killed in a bomb blast in Baghdad. Sri Lanka is the only shining light on the horizon, he then adds. He was almost looking for the applause.

Patten say his friend the diplomat was "literally blown to Kingdom come.'' But, somehow it seemed Patten didn't want to say "blown to Kingdom come" by whom or by what. Was he blown to Kingdom come by fireworks that were meant to go off on Guy Fawke's day? And the Swedish Foreign Minister, was she stabbed by a child who was playing in the supermarket with a knife that she plucked from the racks when her mother was out shopping?

Patten seemed to fight shy of saying anything about terrorism. In his half-in jest manner, he looked as if for him people being killed, though depressing, is a necessary evil to put up with. Like putting up with burning effigies.

Patten then made some rhetorical comments, not really pausing to look up from the lectern. It was not that he was being sheepish -- or that he was reading from a paper.
This was his home territory he felt. As if he was in Bath. He may have been sobered by the effigy burning at the Hilton, but not enough to put on a passionate performance. Not for him any speeches about terrorism and its consequences. When he did say things about how terrorism affects families etc., it was as if he was making another theoretical observation about Huntington -- whom he said has been ''almost proved correct.''

That's like saying that his effigy had almost been burnt. Or that Prabhakaran has almost been a terrorist. Or that the LTTE is almost banned in Britain. He was in fact asked about that ban. He made a joke of it, saying his wife is a lawyer, who never gave him any warnings about the risk of having to be in handcuffs after he meets Prabhakaran.

He then proceeded to the next question -- the one about his meeting Prabha in the first place, on the boy's birthday. He tried to make light of it too, but like the story of his wife being a lawyer, it did not have the desired guffaws. Nobody was laughing. We saw the education of Chris Patten right there before our eyes. These things he realised, may be remote from Britian as Kingdom come is, but they are no laughing matter in Colombo.

After that he seemed to be in a hurry to end his session. Any other questions, he almost pleaded, about any other part of the world. There weren't any. Sri Lankans take themselves too seriously he would have thought. But at the end of it all, it was Patten who was looking quite sombre.

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