Jagger the "dregs of society" says police file

He may now be a knight of the realm and respected elder statesman of pop but to Scotland Yard's finest 35 years ago Mick Jagger was a drug-addled miscreant who represented the "dregs of society".

This was the robust assessment of the millionaire Rolling Stone delivered by a senior Metropolitan Police officer after Jagger made claims that he had been stitched up by a corrupt detective during an infamous drugs raid on his London home in 1969.

The singer was arrested, along with his actress girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, at his house on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea by officers claiming to have found quantities of cannabis, LSD and heroin.

The raid led to Jagger's nascent status as the bad boy of British rock being sealed with a £200 fine for possession of cannabis at Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court.

But in previously unseen documents, published today by the National Archives in Kew, west London, Jagger claimed that the drugs had been planted by a police officer who then demanded £1000 to ensure charges against him were dropped.

The internal Metropolitan Police inquiry into the claims led to Jagger and Faithfull being interviewed by anti-corruption officers, along with his barrister, Michael Havers, the father of the actor Nigel Havers, who would later become Attorney General.

But the papers suggest that the social standing of the musician, increasingly venerated by millions of Stones fans, had yet to penetrate the walls of the Yard.

Commander Robert Huntley, the officer in overall charge of the internal investigation, wrote: "The private persons interviewed during the course of this investigation represent the extreme ends of the scale.

"At one end are public figures while at the other are the dregs of society. It is interesting to note that those who purport to give evidence in support of the allegations are at the lower end of the scale, being drug users or trafficking in them."

The investigators concluded that they had failed to find "any substantial corroborative evidence" for Jagger's claims.

Faithfull, who despite appearing to confess to buying drugs in her police statement never faced charges, was described as a "most unreliable person".

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bulky Yard file notes that when the investigation was passed to the Director of Public Prosecutions, a decision was taken that there were no grounds to charge the officer, named as Detective Sergeant Robin Constable.

It was a finding with which Jagger, named in his police statement as Michael Philip Jagger, would doubtless have strongly disagreed.

In his statement, the singer described how DS Constable had picked up a white box from a table in the dining room of the Cheyne Walk house and pulled out a piece of folded white paper before saying: "Ah, ah, we won't have to look much further."

Jagger said: "[Constable] had earlier been asking me where the LSD was.

"He was holding the unfolded paper up level with his eyes. As I got to him he showed me the paper and I saw it contained some white powder. I said, 'You bastard, you planted me with heroin'. He made no comment."

The musician, whose arrest on 28 May 1969 made headlines around the world, described how both he and the officer tasted the powder: "It had a talcum powder flavour. I said I thought it was talcum powder. I would not know what heroin tastes like but the flavour of the powder was not bitter. [Constable] then folded the paper up and I think it was at this stage he said, 'Well, we won't send this to the lab for a couple of days."

The documents, which include photographs of the drugs alleged to have been seized, claim that DS Constable then produced a lump of cannabis "the size of a toe cap" which had been reduced to a small lump weighing one third of an ounce when the case reached court.

The musician wrote: "After I came out of court, Constable saw me and said, 'Did you notice the amount was down? Not a quarter of a pound any more was it?' I said, 'But you know it wasn't mine'. He said, 'But I didn't put it there'. I said, 'Well, who did? And he said, 'That will cost you a big drink'. I said, 'You can put a note through my door'."

Jagger alleged that the detective repeatedly made offers to "sort it all out" and suggested a sum of £1000 to ensure charges against him were dropped after pointing out that a conviction would make it difficult for him to enter America.

In her statement, Faithfull said her expertise in the different types of cannabis allowed her to differentiate between her own hashish and that "found" by police, noting that her drugs were supplied by a male dresser at the Round House Theatre when she was appearing in Hamlet.

Her statement added that when she first noticed Jagger struggling with plain clothes officers outside the Cheyne Walk house she had rushed to the front door to come to his aid. According to the document, Jagger replied: "Shut the door you silly twit, it's the police.

- THE INDEPENDENT