A couple of years ago, I wrote a novel called Terms May Apply. It’s about a bloke called Kyle Hammond who gets exactly what he wished for… a life-changing windfall… only to discover that getting what you want and actually wanting what you get are two very different things. His life unravels in spectacular fashion, and by the end, he’s left wondering whether he’d have been better off before the universe decided to do him a favour.
Kyle had a rough time of it. But compared to Michael Carroll, he got off lightly.
For the uninitiated, Michael Carroll, a nineteen-year-old binman from Norfolk, won £9.7 million on the National Lottery in 2002. He collected the cheque while wearing an electronic ankle tag, which, say what you like about the lad, is at least committing to a personal brand. The Lottery PR team must have been beside themselves. Nothing screams ‘It Could Be You’ quite like a teenager on a curfew waving an oversized novelty cheque at the cameras.
The Opening Gambit
To his credit, Carroll’s first instinct leaned towards generosity. He gave roughly four million quid away to family; a million each to his mum, aunt, uncle, and his girlfriend’s mother. A decent thing to do by anyone’s standards. The problem lay in what he did with the remaining £5.7 million, which he proceeded to treat with the kind of respect most of us reserve for a loyalty card we found in a coat pocket.
He bought an eight-bedroom mansion in Norfolk for £390,000. Fair enough. Then he spent £400,000 turning the grounds into what can only be described as a cross between Brands Hatch and a scrapyard, complete with a swimming pool and a private demolition derby track. At one point, he owned somewhere between forty and eighty cars. I appreciate the vagueness. When you’re buying BMWs specifically to ram into other BMWs on a Tuesday afternoon, the precise inventory does become rather academic.
A Typical Morning
By his own cheerful admission, Carroll’s daily routine during his peak years went something like this: wake up, three lines of cocaine, half a bottle of vodka, and then get out of bed. Most of us struggle to manage a Weetabix and a cup of tea before nine o’clock. The man operated on a different plane of existence entirely… one with a substantially reduced life expectancy but, presumably, very little trouble with the morning commute.
His drug habit ran to £2,000 a day. He also spent £1,000 a day on sex workers, which, over the course of a year, suggests either an extraordinarily demanding social calendar or a complete inability to negotiate a bulk discount. He threw parties he described as ‘Roman-style orgies’ costing up to £50,000 a night. One imagines the neighbours kept their concerns to a firmly-worded note. “Morning, Michael. We noticed the centurions arriving at half two again. Any chance of keeping the chariot noise down on a school night?”
The Supporting Cast
Large sums of money and poor decision-making have a gravitational pull, and Carroll attracted exactly the kind of entourage you’d expect. He spent £90,000 bailing out drug-using friends (the sort of investment that rarely pays dividends) and handed over £130,000 to blackmailers who’d killed five of his Rottweilers. I’ve read that sentence back three times and it still reads like a deleted subplot from a Guy Ritchie film — one even Guy Ritchie would reject for being too far-fetched.
He also invested around a million pounds through Rangers Financial Management. For anyone unfamiliar with the fiscal history of Glasgow Rangers, this is roughly the equivalent of keeping your life savings in a biscuit tin balanced on the edge of a volcano. A volcano already in the process of erupting.
The Inevitable Ending
By September 2003… less than twelve months after winning… Carroll already lived off his investment bonds. By 2005, his accountant broke the news: one million left. A conversation I would have paid good money to witness. By 2012, the lot had gone. Every last penny. Nine point seven million pounds, evaporated like steam off a chip pan.
The self-styled ‘King of Chavs’ ended up working seven days a week as a coalman, delivering bags of fuel for a living. And here’s the thing that’ll either restore your faith in humanity or make you want to headbutt a wall: he says he’s happier now.
Of course he is.
Because when your benchmark for a ‘quiet Tuesday’ involved industrial quantities of Class A drugs, a demolition derby, and whatever constitutes a Roman-style orgy in Norfolk, hauling bags of coal at five in the morning must feel like a spa break. Everything is relative. A man who’s been hit repeatedly in the face with a frying pan will eventually describe a gentle slap as ‘refreshing.’
The Moral
There isn’t one, really. People will tell you that money doesn’t buy happiness, but those people have never had to check their bank balance before filling up with petrol. What money can do, if you hand £9.7 million to a teenager whose previous financial planning extended to choosing between a kebab and a bag of chips, is accelerate every bad decision to warp speed.
When I wrote Terms May Apply, I thought Kyle Hammond’s downward spiral felt dramatic. Turns out, reality had already written a version that made my fictional one look like a minor inconvenience. The difference is that Kyle had a mysterious old man pulling the strings. Michael Carroll managed the whole thing entirely on his own, which, in a way, is almost more impressive.
Somewhere in Norfolk, a coalman is loading his van before dawn, and he’s genuinely content. Which, when you think about it, might just be the most expensive lesson anyone has ever learned.