Who'd make Jagger a knight?

As biographer of the Rolling Stones, I have the greatest respect for Mick Jagger the singer, the songwriter and, beyond any doubt, the most influential stage performer rock music has known since Elvis Presley.

Although now 59 and a grandfather, Jagger still manages to give superb value as front man to the 'world's greatest rock 'n' roll band'.

On the Stones' forthcoming 40th anniversary tour, he will doubtless show yet again that he can dance the legs off pop idols a third his age.

Even so, I consider the award of a knighthood to Jagger in the Queen's Birthday Honours a disgrace and travesty. Indeed, in the whole field of pop stardom, I can think of no one who less deserves such an honour.

Personally, I would just as soon see the former Sex Pistol, Johnny Rotten, bend his knee before the Queen.

The award is further proof, if any were needed, of the Blair Government's pathetic attempts to win popularity by schmoozing pop musicians and soap opera stars while the nation's real concerns - education, healthcare and transport - slide ever further into disgraceful decay.

For, although the honours may be in the Queen's name, they are given at the Government's recommendation.

And, as we know, Tony Blair is almost as much in awe of rock star dinosaurs as he is of American Presidents.

In 1965, Blair's Old Labour predecessor, Harold Wilson, caused national outrage by having the Queen invest each of The Beatles with one of the smallest honours in her gift, the MBE. For in those days, pop music had little or no appeal to the older generation, and its performers were considered among the most negative influences on socalled 'decent' British society.

That the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations should have climaxed with a marathon pop concert at Buckingham Palace shows how vastly attitudes have changed towards what is, unquestionably, the most successful British product of the past 50 years.

Jagger and the Stones, rather mysteriously, did not appear among the galaxy of pop talent who performed that night. But their single, Satisfaction, was included in the son-et-lumiere display on the floodlit Palace afterwards.

Strange it was to recall the furore over the song's supposedly obscene lyrics on its release 37 years earlier. The concert included three of pop's knights, Sir Cliff Richard, Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney, each of whom received their honour without a whiff of controversy.

So why should Jagger not follow them to the Palace, as he has secretly longed to do for so many years? He is not only a great original artist but, for 40 years, has maintained the Rolling Stones as a British brand name more consistently successful than conventional ones such as BA or Rolls-Royce.

Let me make it clear that my objections have nothing whatever to do with Jagger's lingering reputation as the bad boy of pop, his phenomenal womanising or his past convictions (and brief imprisonment) for drug possession.

The 'bad boy' stuff was almost all PR, thought up by the Stones' first, inspirational, younger manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. When Oldham discovered the band, Jagger was a shy, cautious economics student whose gym-teacher father, Joe, would not hesitate to chastise him if he misbehaved at home.

The true rebel and outlaw of the Stones was never Jagger but their lead guitarist, Keith Richards. When Keith, egged on by Oldham, got the band into hot water, Jagger would usually be wringing his hands in terror of the consequences.

As for his legendary status as a drug user, the fact is that saintly Sir Paul McCartney has more convictions for narcotics possession than Jagger.

The bust that led to Jagger's brief imprisonment in 1967 was only for four amphetamine pills that, at the time, could be bought legally outside Britain as a travel-sickness remedy.

The pills did not even belong to him, but to his then girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull. In a chivalrous gesture - one of few he has ever made to a woman - Jagger took the rap for her.

Nor - I believe - should Jagger be disqualified from knighthood by a love life that makes Don Juan, in contrast, seem like a Quaker elder, and by an attitude to women that gives new meaning to the term Stone Age.

Four years ago, he parted from his second wife, Texan supermodel and actress Jerry Hall, after 20 years and four children together.

Jerry sued for divorce on the grounds of 'multiple infidelities', personified in the baby Jagger had fathered with 29-year-old Brazilian lingerie model Luciana Morad (bringing his tally of children, by four different women, to seven.)

The divorce showed Jagger at his worst, male-chauvinistic, calculating and stingy. His first move was to try to stop Jerry getting a share of his fortune by claiming that their wedding, nine years earlier in a Balinese woodcarver's hut, had been without legal validity.

Since their parting, while Jerry has prospered, Jagger has cut an increasingly undignified, even sad figure as he attempts to recapture his vanished youth with a succession of female companions young enough to be his daughter.

Dignity has, admittedly, never been a prerequisite of modern knighthood. But, in the pop field at least, there has been a necessity to do something a bit more than simply make great music.

The four best-known British pop knights have all gone in for good works to counteract the often selfish, greedy image of their profession.

Elton John became involved in charity work almost from the moment he had his first hit. Cliff Richard devotes much of his income to the Christian aid fund he has endowed. Paul McCartney has given his home city, Liverpool, a performing arts centre. Bob Geldof was the moving spirit behind the magnificent Live Aid concert in 1985.

Jagger, by contrast, has never shown the slightest detectable glimmer of social conscience or, indeed, of patriotism.

Whereas Sir Elton, Sir Paul and Sir Cliff all continued to live in Britain, and pay punitive taxes for the privilege, Jagger had become a tax exile by the early Seventies. His only known spiritual tie to this country is his love of cricket.

The British fans who made him have received little love or even courtesy in return. Rolling Stones tours (which Jagger masterminds) have become increasingly vast moneymaking machines, lasting up to two years, sometimes circumnavigating the world twice and treating their eager public like nothing much more than an enormous, unlimited cashpoint.

The band's last American tour featured ticket prices so high ($100 to $900 each) that it was dubbed 'The Millionaires Watching Millionaires Show'.

Having paid these huge prices, audiences were rewarded with commercial sponsors' names being repeatedly rammed into their faces and by being kept waiting for up to two hours before the band could be bothered to play.

For British Stones' fans, the worst slap in the face came in 1998 when the band suddenly called off the UK leg of their Bridges To Babylon tour after 300,000 tickets had already been sold.

The reason was that changes in that year's Budget had scrapped the Foreign Earnings Deduction, which had allowed tax- exiled Britons a flexible quota of working days back in the UK each year.

Jagger and fellow Stones Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts, as well as many in their road crew, would have lost heavily on the visit as a result. So the UK tour was postponed until the next tax year.

Part of Jagger's public pose has always been studied contempt for institutions and tradition, and cynical amusement towards fellow musicians who court royal approval.

When shaking hands with the Prince of Wales a couple of years back, he kept his left hand firmly buried in his trouser pocket.

In reality, however, he had always been a highly status- conscious social climber with whom it must have rankled that he did not even rate an entry in Who's Who.

Of late, he has clearly tried to become more of an entrepreneurial figure in the Richard Branson mould, investing in art and the internet and starting his own movie company, Jagged Films, which produced the dire screen version of Robert Harris's novel, Enigma.

It was through Harris, apparently, that he made his first social contact with that noted rock fan and 'air guitarist', Tony Blair.

Famously private and standoffish, Jagger has also tried to cultivate a more amiable public face, notably through a recent television documentary, made to promote his disastrous solo album, Goddess In The Doorway.

The programme was a notable vanity project which showed Jagger surrounded by more grovelling yes-men than any monarchic figure since Louis XIV of France.

During filming, Jagger had another meeting with Prince Charles, but not this time with one hand buried in his pocket.

The Prince expressed naive surprise that, in the honours lottery, Jagger had never 'got anything'.

String-pulling, plus - one can be sure - a measure of boot-licking have now achieved the desired result. So now, selfish, sneering Sir Mick enters the pantheon with Sir Elton and co.

Talk about satisfaction!

Cartoon: What a knight!
Vote: Does Jagger deserve a knighthood?