This land is full of knights in shining armour fighting daring battles to save the damsel in distress or the media from a host of ferocious dragons. Their chivalry knows no bounds and they are even ready to make the supreme sacrifice to protect media freedom. Or, so are we told. See how they take on the hoity-toity government potentates and take to the streets carrying placards, shouting slogans and, most of all, braving dreadful sun burn, whenever a scribe comes under attack.

But, these crusading knights get transmogrified into dragons upon being ensconced in power. The fire-breathing dragons that get booted out of power become knights overnight and embark on crusades to protect the media. That is the name of the game.

Freedom of expression has two distinctively different meanings for a government in power and the Opposition. For the government it means the right of the media to inveigh against the Opposition no end and vice versa. On the one hand, the ruling party politicians have no qualms about abusing the kept media to bludgeon its rivals with a view to destroying them politically. The lapdogs of the kept press sling as much mud as possible at the Opposition to ingratiate themselves with their political bosses. They are rewarded for their servility; they get a bone once in a way! On the other hand, the Opposition expects the media to be at its disposal as its shock troops. It wants the media to be independent only of the government.

Thus, both the government and the Opposition want the media to be a comfort woman of sorts at their beck and call.

Politicians of all hues react more or less in the same manner when they get bad press. They resort to coercion or intimidation or even killing to silence hostile media men and women. Both the SLFP and the UNP have journalists' blood on their hands, don't they?

At times even the self-proclaimed champions of media freedom lay bare their true faces when they feel their interests are threatened. On Monday, Opposition and UNP Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe happened to throw a tantrum at a media briefing. He vented his spleen on a Daily Mirror journalist over a political comment where he had been referred to as a weak leader.

Whether the UNP leader is weak or strong is debatable and he has a right to defend himself. What is at issue is not his right of reply but the manner in which he sought to exercise it. Without making a mountain out of a molehill, he could have sent a rebuttal to that paper.

The media has every right to describe a political leader, from a PS member to the Executive President, the way it deems fit short of defaming him or her. That right cannot be questioned.

The UNP leader insists he is not a weak leader. He is entitled to his opinion of himself. But, the question is whether his party would have had such a prolonged stay in the Opposition under a strong leader.

Today, the UNP is in the same predicament as the SLFP from 1977 to 1994. A breakaway group of MPs led by none other than the deputy leader of the UNP has sided with the government. Cynics say there are more UNP MPs in the government than in the Opposition. Things fall apart, as Yeats has said, when the centre cannot hold. And the centre cannot hold when leadership is weak.

There are ups and downs in politics. The late SLFP leader Sirima Bandaranaike failed to revive the party and win any election after 1977. Her party found itself in the doldrums suffering as it did ignominious defeats one after the other until her daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga made a comeback and steered it to victory in 1994. President Kumaratunga also became a lame duck in 2001, when a group of her MPs led by SLFP General Secretary S. B. Dissanayake crossed over to the UNP. It took her nearly three years to turn the tables on the UNP-led UNF which had captured power in Parliament.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa was described as a weak leader when he chose to take all the LTTE provocations lying down. But for Prabhakaran's military misadventure at Mavil Aru in 2006, President Rajapaksa would have carried forward the appeasement policy of the UNF government. The credit for making him a hero should go to Prabhakaran.

President Rajapaksa is strong at present but if he continues his blunders like having square pegs in round holes such as the CPC chief who landed the entire government in the soup, things will begin to fall apart for him as well. The surest way for a head of state to commit political hara-kiri is to be surrounded by a coterie of incompetent stooges adept at nothing but singing hosannas.

What really keeps the UNP in the Opposition is its transformation during the past one and a half decades or so. Today, it looks more an NGO than a robust political organisation. It is dependent more on the international community and the NGO circuit than on the masses who have votes to make or break governments. It has failed to make a stand on the country's war on terror. Some of its leaders seem to take a perverse pleasure in counting the number of soldiers killed by the LTTE. Little wonder that the UNP has alienated its traditional supporters who feel for this country.

When a party continues to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at successive elections with its parliamentarians, provincial councillors, PS members and party supporters voting with their feet, can its leader call himself strong?