It wasn’t just class warfare being carried out by chippy, lowly paid public-sector workers, trying to grab some headlines along the way (although Vince suspected it partly was). It was meant to pull away ladders, tear off the old school tie and, most of all, loosen tongues. It was meant to give a clear message: their blue-chip lawyers and old-boy networks couldn’t save them now. The bad old days of the police working almost as a private army for the upper classes, keeping the barbarians well and truly at the gate and not in the grounds, were supposedly long gone (although Vince also suspected it was not that long and not that gone). A pack of squad cars jammed with uniformed coppers roared up Regent Street and along to Nicky DeVane’s Beak Street studio. Inside the studio, the sinewy frame of Kevin Ridgeway, guitarist with the High Rollers, the new bad boys of the British pop invasion, was laid out on the floor and louchely grazing on an oily joint as he watched Nicky DeVane snap his model girlfriend, Minetta Fruitful.
