This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
And Finally
The Queen refused to hand Jagger his knighthood, new book claims
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 11 July 2012
A new biography of Mick Jagger, ‘Mick: The Wild Life And Mad Genius Of Jagger’, claims that The Queen refused to personally give the Rolling Stones frontman his knighthood in 2003, instead asking Prince Charles to do it on her behalf. The book claims that she did not feel he frontman was a suitable candidate for the Honours List, on the grounds of his “anti-establishment views” and his friendship with her sister, Princess Margaret, which she saw as a “corrupting influence”.
You’d have thought that if he’d genuinely harboured anti-establishment views he wouldn’t have formed a relationship with a member of the royal family or accepted an OBE, but there you go.
Actually, according to The Daily Mail, The Queen had an even longer list of complaints which led to her deciding that she “did not have the stomach” to present the award, including that he had once called her “Chief Witch”, had claimed that “anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope”, had acted unpatriotically by moving to France to avoid tax in the 1970s, didn’t do as much charity work as Elton John, and had embodied the ‘sex, drugs and rock n roll’ ethos in the 1970s “more than any other figure”.
An anonymous source, said to be a royal courtier, told the book’s author, Christopher Anderson: “The Queen looked at Mick Jagger’s name on that list, and there was absolutely no way in the world that she was going to take part in that. So she simply arranged to be elsewhere”.
The ‘elsewhere’, it seems, was a hospital, where she arranged to have an operation on her knee. That’s how much she didn’t want to have to go near Mick Jagger. She reportedly told a doctor: “I would much rather be here than at Buckingham Palace knighting a certain party”.
Despite handing over the knighthood on behalf of his mother, Prince Charles is also said to have been surprised that Jagger was given the award, telling one of his aides: “It’s really quite difficult to believe. A knighthood. Just incredible”.
