British Foreign Secretary David Miliband says he, unlike one of his predecessors, would never stoop so low as to take a lady’s bed and force her to sleep in an airplane aisle.

Reviving a two-year-old incident that caused Britain’s former top diplomat Jack Straw no end of embarrassment while in office, Miliband jokingly accused Straw of “pathetic” behavior when he appropriated Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s cabin on a long-haul flight to Iraq.

“I thought Jack did something terribly unchivalrous, didn’t he at one point claim your bed?” Miliband asked Rice during a question-and-answer session with reporters traveling with them on a visit to Silicon Valley.

“Yes, but it was offered because Jack had some kind of a cold or something,” Rice replied. One of her aides noted that Straw had been recovering from bronchitis when he accepted Rice’s offer to take the bed in her private cabin on an April 2006 trip to Baghdad.

“Oh, that’s pathetic, pathetic,” a laughing Miliband interjected.

“So I slept in the aisle, it was OK,” Rice said, prompting Miliband to repeat: “That’s pathetic, pathetic.” He then pointed out with mock gallantry that he had been more than happy to sleep in the regular seats on Rice’s plane when he last traveled with her to Afghanistan in February.

“I heroically slept in the back seats all the way to Kabul,” he said with bravado. “Heroically.”