Churchill scion stung over £7m drugs ring

Sir Winston Churchill's great-grandson faces up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty in Australia to being involved in a £7m drug operation. Nicholas Jake Gompo Barton was arrested at his Sydney apartment in June last year after a three-month undercover police operation. Police said they seized about 250,000 ecstasy tablets with a street value of around £5m, 18kg of the powder MDMA used to make the drug, and two industrial pill presses. Barton was originally charged with the more serious offence of supplying a large commercial quantity of a prohibited drug, which carries a possible life sentence. He admitted to the lesser charge of "taking part knowingly" in the supply of a commercial quantity of a prohibited drug.
 
Barton, who goes by the name of Jake, is the son of Arabella Spencer Churchill, a founder of the Glastonbury music festival. One of his middle names, Gompo, is said to be a tribute to a Tibetan resistance leader, whom Churchill backed in the fight against China's 1949 invasion of the Himalayan kingdom. Barton spent his early years in squats and communes with his hippie mother after she separated from his father, James Barton, a Scottish school teacher.
 
He emigrated at the age of 18 to Australia, where he studied marine biology and spent stints working both in the Australian film industry and as a pearl farmer in Indonesia. He became an Australian citizen in the 1990s. Friends say he has rarely spoken about his aristocratic background. He will be sentenced in February. ·