Captain Moonlight: Love machine, or is it just an ugly rumour?

THAT Tony Blair: what do you reckon? This picture, I think, conclusively confirms the view that he did not conceive political ambition until after he left Oxford. Even President Bill didn't leave a hostage to fortune like this big hair. Tony, you will now know, was the singer in a university rock band called Ugly Rumours. On stage, he wore flared trousers and a singlet exposing at least a foot of bare midriff. 'We kind of wanted him to be our love interest,' Mark Ellen, former editor of Smash Hits and Q, once told the Captain. 'Tony was our love machine.' Fair enough: de gustibus non disputandum est, chacun a son gout, and so on. But there is more. The title Ugly Rumours was taken from a hidden message on a Grateful Dead record sleeve. And this is the man who has firmly ruled out legalising cannabis. A Deadhead against Dope? Enough to make you inhale sharply, I should say.

(Photograph omitted)