UNDERCOVER Tory Tony Blair has shocked the bourgeois world in which he circulates by disclosing Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky was his inspiration to get involved in politics.

Etonian and Oxford University-educated Blair says he read a biography of Trotsky after a gig with his student rock band, Ugly Rumours.

He said he stayed up all night reading it, and it changed his life.

Unfortunately Blair's conversion on the road to Damascus was very short-lived and he quickly discovered it was more useful to his political career to abandon any pretence of being a Socialist and adapt to the ingrained, established political opportunism and right-wing policies of the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock.

Blair went on to benefit from popular revulsion with, and hatred of, Thatcherism by winning three general elections beginning in 1997.

Blair's right-wing programme in Government saw Labour lose catastrophically in 2010, with Labour being all but wiped out in Scotland in a landslide for the SNP.

The party is still struggling to regain the confidence of working-class people to this day, although Corbyn is making a good stab at recovering that lost confidence.

Unlike Blair, Leon Trotsky remained true to his beliefs and principles all his life, and paid with his life at the hands of Stalin's assassins in 1940.

The idea Blair was ever a Socialist is, like his former student rock band, just an Ugly Rumour.

James Roberts, Wallasey