An awkward moment from Blair's student days returns to haunt him

First came the picture of David Cameron alongside other members of Oxford's notoriously hedonistic Bullingdon Club. Now Tony Blair has suffered a similar embarrassment with the emergence of a photograph showing the Prime Minister making a lewd gesture alongside fellow undergraduates during his years at the university.

Perhaps the apparently shocking image of the St John's College Archery Club should not come as too much of a surprise. University was a time of social experimentation for Mr Blair. He played with being different people in different groups of friends, many of whom had no idea of his other faces. Two of his circles consisted largely of public schoolboys. One was the Archery Club, a frivolous drinking fraternity rather than a competitive sporting venture. The other was the band in which he was lead singer, Ugly Rumours.

Formal photographs of the Archery Club were posed and taken, including this one, in the summer of 1975. No photographs seem to survive of the Ugly Rumours, although there are occasional suggestions that an audiotape exists.

While the Ugly Rumours band members played down their relatively privileged backgrounds in favour of pop demotic, the Archery Club was a self-conscious, not to say self-parodying, piece of upper-class silliness. It was an all-male club, with women allowed only as guests on "Ladies' Days".

Its members wore blazers and straw boaters, although the photographic evidence is that the dress code was enforced in a haphazard fashion. Some of its members were genuinely posh, such as David Fursdon, the one wearing the eye-patch (no one can now remember why). Mr Fursdon, whose family has farmed 700 acres in Devon since the 13th century, went on to lead one of the largest opposition movements against the Blair Government, as president of what used to be known as the Country Landowners' Association.

But most of its members were middle or (such as Blair) upper middle class, privately educated or grammar school boys, mostly heading for careers in law, journalism or education. This was play-acting at being upper class; by comparison David Cameron's Bullingdon Club was the real thing.

Blair was an ebullient character at a rather dull Oxford college. To each of his different personas he brought enthusiasm, energy and an unusual lack of embarrassment. At the Archery Club he played the part of a raucous, if slightly camp, hooray Henry: part rugby dinner, part Brideshead Revisited. As a "junior love god" front man for the Ugly Rumours he gave it a "bit of serious Mick Jagger, a bit of finger-wagging and punching the air", according to Mark Ellen, the bassist.

In other settings, his eagerness shaded into earnestness, as in his political and theological discussions with a group of friends, many of them from abroad, who were not remotely posh. Among these friends, Blair's growing interest in politics, and in the Labour Party as the only realistic vehicle for social change, verged on the obsessional. And only very few of his friends - not including his best friend, Marc Palley, next to him in the photograph - knew that, towards the end of his time at St John's, he asked to be confirmed in the Church of England in the College Chapel.

To everything he did he brought an enthusiasm and a touch of naivety that could be endearing or obnoxious, according to taste. He liked to be the centre of attention - he had ever since he delighted passengers on a liner to Australia by dancing on stage at the age of 18 months until, as his father recall- ed, "his nappy fell down".

When I researched his Oxford days at the time he became leader of the Labour Party, a large number of his contemporaries remembered him. "He stood out," was a frequent comment. Yet there was another side to him, that would never have been guessed at from the photographic record alone. That was Blair the Contemplative, a rather private and self-controlled young man, whose various public faces were used, changed and adapted as he sought out his way of making a mark on the world.

It was at Oxford that he moved towards politics as the field in which he would make that mark. In between school and university, in his gap year in London, he had tried - energetically but innocently - to become a rock promoter. At Oxford that took the form of joining a band to discover that he could not really sing - "he looked great" was the most that one of his contemporaries would say of his voice.

He also returned to acting at Oxford, with several of the students in the photograph, including Nicholas Lowton and Perry Sharrock. He had been an outstanding actor at Fettes College - admittedly with only one real triumph to his name, the part of Captain Stanhope in the anti-war polemic, Journey's End. Ironically, the play had a long successful run in London soon after the Iraq war. But at Oxford his attempts tended towards comedy (although he did play in The Threepenny Opera), at which he lacked the ruthless professionalism of, say, his Footlights contemporaries at Cambridge, such as Rowan Atkinson.

Sharrock once said that Blair was happier directing comedy sketches than acting in them, although he was "quite good" in the role of Andy Warhol's interpreter in one sketch. It was only after he had been Prime Minister for many years that he finally developed a mastery of comic timing - just as most of his audience were beginning to decide that he was definitely not funny.

It was at Oxford, however, that Blair "got" religion - the nominal Christianity of his schooldays being made relevant as a gospel of social justice by his Australian friend, the postgraduate "renegade priest", Peter Thomson. As his time at Oxford progressed - although this photographic record of frivolity was taken right at the end of his time there, in the summer of 1975 - he became seriously committed to the political means of pursuing that mission. Despite having avoided student politics at Oxford, apart from a visit to the Union for the dual purpose of seeing Michael Heseltine speak and impressing a girlfriend, he emerged from university within weeks of this photograph as a politician on the path to the highest place.