SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

THE SYMPOSIUM: Jagger with William Rees-Mogg, Father Thomas Corbishley and Baron Stow Hill. Right, Marianne Faithfull at court fellow musicians and liberal voices made themselves heard. Richard Hamilton’s picture based on a photo of Jagger and Fraser in handcuffs, punningly titled Swingeing London, has become an enduring icon of Pop Art in Tate Modern.

There was immediately a successful application for an appeal and for bail. Jagger and Richards spent only one night in jail.

The most important support – Jagger says it’s what saved them – came from a most unexpected quarter. On July 1 there was an editorial in The Times written by Rees-Mogg himself (a man at least as strangely otherworldly as his MP son Jacob). Headlined “Who Breaks A Butterfly On A Wheel?” – a quotation from the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope – it argued that the judgment was flawed and unjust, Jagger’s offence was nothing more than a technicality and displaying him in handcuffs and sentencing him to jail was punishment not for this misdeed but for being a Rolling Stone.

On July 31 Lord Parker, the Lord Chief Justice no less, quashed the sentences and that was that. As one of the Stones’ most iconic tracks declared the following year, this was Sympathy For The Devil.

If there was a real victim in this case it was Faithfull, whose relationship with Jagger ended a few months later. For many years she had a difficult life and is probably still most famous for the rug and a story involving a Mars bar – not true but too tasty to die. As she says, for the Stones the bust was a boon. It transformed them from a rock band into cultural heroes.