Extracts from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech in Cambridge on 13 September 1999, when he was announcing new initiatives on IT, including my appointment as "e-envoy":
"Secondly however, we need to act faster and co-ordinate better. So, we're re-organising the way the Government works ... and we're appointing Alex Allan as the e-envoy.
"He's well placed to do this. He ran Number 10 as its senior civil servant, so he knows how government works, and indeed was in charge of the Private Office at Downing Street when I first came into power. He's one of the very few senior civil servants with his own website - and certainly the only one whose website has a comprehensive guide to the lyrics of the Grateful Dead!
"Indeed it was Alex who reminded me that the band I was in at Oxford, called Ugly Rumours, actually was out of a Grateful Dead album. I've been told many bits of interesting information here today, and there's a bit of useless information for you in return."