Tony took a long time to get into the swing

Tony Blair spent the Swinging Sixties not in a drug-fuelled haze but as a model schoolboy.

While the Beatles were playing in the Cavern Club, young Blair was a prep-school pupil who turned out with a Union Jack to cheer the Queen on a visit to Durham.

It was not until the Seventies that Young Blair finally began to look like a rebel.

In fact, the future Prime Minister only started to model himself on Mick Jagger and to listen to Led Zeppelin in his final year at Scottish public school Fettes College.

In 1966 - the year hanging was abolished and Bob Dylan went electric - Blair won the school prize for playing rugby.

That summer, when Carnaby Street became the fashion capital of the world, Blair stood in the school mock elections - as a Conservative.

He has since described how, aged 14, he tried to run away to the Bahamas by slipping on board a plane at Newcastle airport. But flights did not run from Newcastle to the Bahamas at the time.

As his teenage years progressed he began to acquire a mildly rebellious reputation, with a constantly loose tie and dirty shoes.

But in 1967, the summer of free love and Woodstock, young Blair spent the warm weather captaining the junior colt cricket XI.

As a sixth former, at the very end of the decade, Blair began to let his hair grow beyond the regulation school trim and was once frogmarched to the barber by his headmaster. He spent a gap year in 1971 trying to launch himself as a pop promoter, sleeping rough in a London park one night and hanging around the capital in a pair of white flares.

At Oxford, with Glam Rock in full swing, he grew his hair long and joined a band called Ugly Rumours. But, say contemporaries, he was still a conventional youth at heart and never dabbled in drugs.