Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ 1967 trial for drug possession at Chichester crown court is one of the most notorious incidents in the history of 60s rock. Everyone with even a passing interest in the Rolling Stones knows the salient details: the grim role of the News of the World in setting up a police raid on Richards’ country pile, Redlands; the entirely apocryphal rumours about Mars Bars and Marianne Faithfull; the band’s brief attempt to escape the press attention by travelling to Morocco, where Richards began a long relationship with guitarist Brian Jones’s then-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg; the unexpected intervention of the Times’ editor William Rees-Mogg, protesting against the severity of the sentencing in an editorial headlined Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?; their subsequent release, Mick Jagger’s appearance on a hastily convened edition of the TV show World in Action, debating the whole business with Rees-Mogg, former home secretary Frank Soskice, the Bishop of Woolwich and Fr Thomas Corbishley (“a leading British Jesuit”).
But when playwright Charlotte Jones was reading up on the Redlands bust and trial, it was another, more overlooked aspect of events on which she alighted. Michael Havers was an intriguing choice of defence counsel for Jagger and Richards. He was not a barrister like John Mortimer, who seemed to delight in taking on the establishment on behalf of everyone from the editors of Oz magazine to the Sex Pistols to the publishers of Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Havers was the establishment, a Garrick Club member who helped wrongly convict the Guildford Four, became a Conservative MP and ultimately lord chancellor under Margaret Thatcher.
