The Oyston Files

The Oyston Files by Andrew Rosthorn

At 3:20 a.m. on Sunday, August 10, 1975, the 21-year old daughter of a millionaire lost control of her Ford Escort on the A583 out of Blackpool and killed two young mothers as they walked home from a Saturday night.

The crash triggered a cover-up. The cover-up turned into the longest and most expensive privately-funded dirty tricks campaign in British political history.

A poisonous feud ruined dozens of lives.

A chief constable was sacked. A long-serving minister in John Major's Conservative government resigned.

A judge jailed Lancashire's richest man.

Some of the victims were rich, some were very poor, some were very foolish, some were non-political, some were famous, many were young and fragile. Their lives were ruined by the enormous power of central government in the United Kingdom in the days of Margaret Thatcher. The story of how it happened lay in the Oyston Files.

Andrew Rosthorn found three tonnes of evidence, including Home Office documents and covert tape recordings, stored in an old manor house during a prison sentence served by Britain's 64th richest man.

Owen Oyston, estate agent and owner of Blackpool Football Club was for four years the United Kingdom's richest prisoner.

A conspirator tape-recorded a phone call from a Fleet Street financial journalist. Martin Tomkinson told the political agitator Michael Murrin: "You and I have just fucked up a £10 million plus deal for Oyston [or so it seems]. This does not happen every day and from now on things can only get dirtier."

In May 1992, Esquire described "a seamy saga of smears, death and vendetta... Or how two Tory MPs, a fish and chip shop owner and a Blackpool wheeler dealer with a secret grudge tried to ruin a socialist millionaire."

In October 1998, Lobster Magazine reported that "the 15-year campaign waged against Owen Oyston by Michael Murrin, the owner of a fish and chip shop in the village of Longridge, Lancs, was backed by help and cash payments raised by two former government ministers and a millionaire friend of Margaret Thatcher... The former Tory ministers are Sir Robert Atkins and Lord Blaker. Their target was the Labour Party's biggest private contributor in the days of Neil Kinnock's leadership."

Defence counsel for the Sunday Times apologised in court in 1992: "It was never the intention of the Sunday Times to suggest that Mr Oyston was corrupt or had engaged in any kind of corrupt relationship or dealings. They take this opportunity to make that clear and to express their apologies to Mr Oyston for the distress which the articles have caused him, his family and friends."

But five years later, after a judge had jailed Oyston for six years for the rape and indecent assault of a young woman, the conspirator Michael Murrin, a man who had supplied stolen documents to the Sunday Times and spent four years urging police to arrest Oyston, released his own files and declared, ‘I‘m the man who put him where he is today.’

Protected by armed police officers during her triumphant Tory party conferences in Blackpool, the British prime-minister Margaret Thatcher stayed overnight at the home of a property developer who had paid a millionaire private detective to run a dirty tricks campaign against the opposition Labour Party's biggest private contributor.

Tory politicians bought and sold the income tax records of their political opponents, a crime never previously recorded in the two hundred year history of income tax in Britain.

In 2018 the body of one of the four children orphaned in the double death crash was discovered hanging from a tree in a remote wood on Wolf Fell, no more than ten miles from the manor house where the Oyston Files were found.