Photo: Gavin Rodgers/Pixel
As someone who spent a lot of time in his bedroom practising a solo activity during youth and early adulthood, I have a lot of sympathy for Tony Blair. That well-known photo from his Oxford days is reproduced in today's Guardian, with a wider crop that shows his hands and arms, and it's easy to imagine his embarrassment about the gesture he is making.
Because he is clearly doing exactly what I used to do: playing air guitar. It must be political differences that have made observers decide he is making the gesture universally associated with onanism, because no one familiar with the joys of miming along to rock records could doubt the truth.
Look closely at the picture. First the face, with the mouth open in the manner adopted by mid-70s rock guitarists while "peeling off" a solo. Second, the right hand, held at the recognised air guitar height - the onanist gesture is generally made from a position higher up the chest (though 1970s abuse mores may have been different, of course). Third, the position of the left arm, which is held away from the body, crooking at the elbow: make a chord shape on an imaginary guitar neck, and this is the position you will find yourself in.
And then there's the circumstantial evidence, namely that Blair was at this point a rock star wannabe, the lead singer of Ugly Rumours, and particularly thrown to what is known in rock as "throwing shapes". His former bandmate Mark Ellen described Blair's rehearsal to CNN: "He sat there and did this kind of Mick Jagger impression actually sitting in an armchair, you know, sticking the old chin out, stabbing the finger in the air ... And we thought if this guy can dance so well sitting down, he's going to be sensational standing up, so get him in, you know, this is our man." Now tell me that's not the kind of man you might catch playing air guitar.
That said, what I believe he was doing is not necessarily an improvement on the gesture others reckon he is making. There's an old dictum that playing air guitar is like masturbation: you can't really see anything wrong with it, but you wouldn't want your mum to catch you at it. It's certainly not something you'd want to be photographed doing, especially if you had a sense of destiny about your future.
So why do it? Because Blair, obviously, is an incorrigible show-off with an asinine sense of humour. He probably thought the likely audience for the photograph would be amused, in the same way that he thought his gag about his wife running off with "the bloke next door" was amusing. This raises the prospect that our prime minister does not just want to be an average sort of guy, the kind you might meet in a pub, but that he actually is the sort of guy you might meet in a pub - the boring bloke, whom you go to the other end of the bar to avoid.
