I’VE been celebrating this year one of the most important anniversaries in England’s post-war history. I have raised a glass – or three – to an institution, which, through the years of economic decline, industrial strife and political buffoonery, through the loss of empire and the unending search for new markets for arms exports, has remained indestructible.

Its leading figures, now in the autumn of their lives, enjoy unimaginable luxury and comfort, but like many ordinary families, they have been tested by controversy, personal misfortunes, jealousies and bitter feuds.

There have been parties to mark the Queen’s jubilee, but pull on those Lapping Tongue T-shirts and put out even more flags, I say, for The Rolling Stones. The planet’s greatest rock group made its first public appearance 50 years ago – in July 1962 – at Soho’s Marquee Club.

That 50-minute set – led by the band’s founder, the outstandingly talented, but doomed guitarist Brian Jones – was unpromising. Their playlist was pure, stripped-down blues and R&B – almost wholly covers – while the Marquee in the early 1960s was a leading jazz venue.

It was, though, the start of an enterprise which, as Philip Norman notes in the introduction to his unauthorised, yet meticulously detailed biography of Sir Mick Jagger, was to last far longer than any band then or since.

As an unassailable music brand, it stands alongside those of the great philharmonic orchestras in Berlin, Vienna, London and New York, wherein lies at least one clue to its survival.

The Stones, runs the familiar complaint, always do the same stuff: their great rock anthems, and pure Chicago and Delta blues, but where’s the innovation, the boundary pushing? Good question, and the answer is that there isn’t any.

The Berlin Phil is still in business precisely because it sticks to what it knows and does best, which is what the Stones have been doing unashamedly for 50 years, and nearly always – in studios, clubs and arenas – impeccably.

At their two Shine A Light concerts in Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre, in 2006 – filmed by Martin Scorsese and featuring a Buddy Guy- Jagger duet – the unique sound and spirit were much as they were in 1962, despite line-up changes, the backing singers and squads of saxophonists, and the toll of the years.

Norman records and examines every twist and turn in Jagger’s life, from a happy, middle-class Dartford, Kent, childhood shared off and on with Keith Richards from the rough end of town, through the rock ’n’ roll years, the drugs, wives and Other W o m e n , the child r e n a n d grandchildren to a 69-year-old senior sitting on a fortune estimated at £190-something million and fending off, not noticeably successfully, the wrinkles with a brand of face cream quite small jars of which sell for £1,250.

The seemingly rebellious, long-haired London School of Economics drop-out the British establishment appeared determined to destroy emerges as such a conservative, if libertarian, figure that his acceptance of a knighthood (offered by Tony Blair) fails to surprise, though it appalled for quite different reasons both Richards and, reportedly, the Queen.

Having rescued the Stones from financial disaster and a parasitical manager in 1971, he took control of the band’s music, tour management and merchandising, and the money which now pours into a web of Netherlandsregistered companies reporting to a partnership comprising Jagger, Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood. Who gets how much from worldwide album sales estimated at £200m isn’t known. While clearly not short of a bob or two, his Mustique mansion is on the holiday rentals market for several months each year. The weekly rent is £10,000.

JAGGER is an intellectual with a longestablished taste for the company of the wealthy – preferably titled. He’s articulate, but he chooses to say as little as possible in public, and he’s well-read. He opened the free 1969 Hyde Park concert, two days after the death of Brian Jones in Sussex swimming pool, with a reading from Shelley’s elegiac Adonais.

The on-stage cockney accent was as fake as the Dixie inflections in the vocals.

Jagger’s seismic appeal to many women has been undeniable. He has form as a heartless lover, an unfaithful husband and a good father.

At least two of his women – Chrissie Shrimpton and Marianne Faithfull – made suicide attempts.

Faithfull’s first weak words when she came out of a six-day coma and saw Jagger at her bedside were: “Wild horses wouldn’t drag me away.” The song was for her.

He has looked after his children and grandchildren well – school fees, showing up for birthdays and university graduations, lavish holidays – but his lawyers dealt with pay-offs to all of his women with forensic detachment.

His current girlfriend is ex-model turned fashion designer L’Wren Scott, 23 years his junior. A third marriage seems unlikely, unless there are compelling tax advantages.

If 60 is the new 40, how is Jagger dealing with his middle years?

His trainer puts him through daily running, Pilates, yoga, and gym routines. Our bodies, of course, are temples. Richards’ might be wrecked, but Jagger is choosy about what he puts in his. He’s a wholefood – plus vitamin supplements – man now.

Norman’s history is a must-read for those who, like me, early on in the 60s declared their allegiance in England’s other north-south divide – Beatles or Stones; syrupy pop songs or visceral blues and rock. It does not, though, provide a clue to the central Mick Jagger puzzle, best described by a documentary film-maker who spent most of 2001 travelling with him: “A lot of the time he seemed no different from someone you’d meet in a golf club in Hampshire. But whenever he walked into a recording studio, it was as if he was inhabited by a different spirit.”

Perhaps only he can explain it, but on this – as on much else – those trademark lips are closed.

􀁧 Mick Jagger, by Philip Norman, (Harper- Collins, £20).