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April 17, 2006
The Notorious Tony Blair: when a PM-to-be dated a future director
The Independent reports on the college dalliances of spiky former film cricket Mary Harron and director of The Notorious Bettie Page, including with the Brit PM. Marie Woolf and Francis Elliott wrote in late February: 
"When Tony Blair was a long-haired undergraduate at Oxford, he dated the vivacious Canadian student and future film director Mary Harron, who observed she went out with the future prime minister because he was "good looking in a kind of sweet way, and wasn't at all predatory"... By remarkable coincidence, she also went out with Chris Huhne, an Oxford contemporary of Blair, who last week was tipped in the polls as the most likely contender to take over from Charles Kennedy as Liberal Democrat leader.... Tony Blair, who resembled a Led Zeppelin roadie with his flares and long hair, was studying law and singing Rolling Stones covers with his band, the Ugly Rumours. In the audience of one of his college bar gigs may have been Chris Huhne, who drove an old yellow taxi and dressed head to toe in denim, when not politicking with the university Labour club.
He was also writing for the university newspaper Isis, which he went on to edit, bringing him into the milieu of future Fleet Street editors such as Tina Brown, the future editor of Tatler, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Stephen Glover, the columnist and founding editor of The Independent on Sunday, and Patrick Wintour, just appointed political editor of The Guardian, were also in his inner circle of friends... [B]oth ended up managing the heavy metal band Jaded at different times, without knowing each other... At Oxford, Huhne and Blair's paths did not cross directly. But between 1972 and 1975 both students were taken with a vivacious Canadian "literary type" that hung out with the trendy music set who partied to bands such as the Grateful Dead. Mary Harron later commented that while at Oxford she was "seeking bohemia, looking for the underground"... Harron, in an interview in 1994, hinted at which boyfriend she may have preferred. "Even before he became an MP and famous, I always thought of Tony as the only 'nice' person that I ever went out with at Oxford," she said."
Posted by pride at April 17, 2006 03:45 PM
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