Tons of documents and tape recordings recovered from an old manor house in Lancashire reveal the true depths of corruption in English provincial life at the end of the twentieth century.
Owen Oyston was the British Labour Party’s biggest private financial contributor in the Thatcher years. The millionaire owner of radio stations and glossy magazines had bailed out both the left-wing News on Sunday newspaper and his beloved Blackpool Football Club but was largely unaware that he had been marked down as a dangerous enemy of the centralised British political system.
According to the former MI5 officer David Shayler, the intelligence services file on Owen Oyston was re-examined in 1992 by the head of MI5, when it looked as if Neil Kinnock’s revived Labour party might defeat the Conservatives after 13 years in opposition. But Kinnock fell at the final fence in the election that year and by 1997, when Tony Blair’s New Labour wrested power from the Tories, Oyston was in jail, serving a six year sentence for the rape and indecent assault of a young woman.
The secrets of the conspiracy that destroyed Oyston’s business and political career now lie in a huge archive gathered during the twenty years in which he was tormented by secret enemies, the four years in which he fought multiple rape charges and the three years he spent in prison, refusing to admit his guilt. Behind the stone walls of Claughton Hall, above the Lune valley, near Lancaster, amongst thousands of Home Office computer printouts, police witness statements, defence affidavits and news cuttings were found tape recordings of conversations between a group of anti-Oyston, anti-Labour conspirators. The group included the former Tory government ministers, Lord Blaker and Sir Robert Atkins MEP, the property developer Bill Harrison and a private detective Christopher More, who has since been jailed for assisting his son to flee from Britain and escape from a murder hunt.
The plotters successfully conspired to steal the income tax records of their political opponents, a crime not previously recorded in the two hundred year history of income tax in Britain. Innocent local government officers and Labour councillors were arrested and charged with corruption. Future members of parliament were targeted and questioned by police. The campaign cost the British taxpayer and Owen Oyston over a quarter of a billion pounds.
When Oyston was jailed for six years in 1996, the political activist Michael Murrin, who had for years pressed Greater Manchester Police to arrest Oyston, declared, ‘I’m the man who put him where he is today’.
Printouts from the government HOLMES computer track the activities of the police officers working on what became Manchester’s biggest-ever sex case. Older documents include a copy of the secret Osmond Report, a police investigation which led to the sacking of the Chief Constable of Lancashire, accused of being improperly influenced by one of the conspirators against Oyston. The report showed that a Tory member of the police committee unlawfully approached him to protect the daughter of the property developer Bill Harrison, after her car had killed two young mothers in a road accident. The files have also demonstrated that Bill Harrison was a friend of the former MI9 man Sir Airey Neave, the man who organised Margaret Thatcher’s leadership campaign. (Mrs Thatcher was five times a house guest at Bill Harrison’s home during his campaign against Oyston and the leaders of the local Preston Labour Party.) Harrison was shown by The Sunday Times to have improperly rented public land to take millions of pounds of cash from weekend caravanners in Blackpool. His cash was used to steal documents from the Oyston estate agency company files and to pay for the theft of the bank account details of Labour Party politicians.
There is a transcript of a hearing in a closed court room in which a senior barrister accidentally misled a crown court judge into allowing the Crown Prosecution Service to keep secret the financial profile of a Labour Party politician, a document which had been gathered in breach of the Official Secrets Acts by Christopher More, hired by Bill Harrison.
Operations Angel……
Prime Minister John Major’s best friend in the Commons, the former Tory minister Robert Atkins, now an MEP, was revealed as one of the secret and misleading informants in Operation Angel, an abortive police investigation into Labour politicians that cost £20 million. Another plotter was Mrs Thatcher’s former home secretary Lord Waddington. There are copies of letters in which Lord Waddington tried to persuade the Director of Public Prosecutions to start a corruption case against Labour politicians in Lancashire. The DPP, Sir Allan Green, refused the request. Soon afterwards Green was forced to resign, after being observed talking to a prostitute on a London street.
….and Cheetah
Michael Murrin provoked a Sunday Times investigation which led to Operation Cheetah, an abortive police inquiry that cost another £20 million. Derek Hatton, deputy Labour leader of Liverpool and a noted opponent of central government, was cleared of all charges after two and a half years under investigation.
Evidence of the illegal political conspiracy against Oyston is now well established but despite his personal wealth and notable support in the House of Commons from Dale Campbell-Savours MP, Oyston has so far failed to prove his innocence on the rape and indecent assault charges. Applications to the Court of Appeal, the European Court of Human Rights and the Criminal Cases Review Commission have all failed. But evidence does exist to show how the Labour Party’s principal private benefactor was put behind bars and turned into Britain’s richest prisoner.
Non-Disclosure in Regina versus Oyston
The police computer printouts have revealed that for fourteen months, between Oyston’s arrest and his conviction, Greater Manchester Police and the Crown Prosecution Service concealed from his lawyers the fact that two documents in their possession could be used to prove his innocence. A 1992 floral calendar and a black ‘Ostaline’ brand notebook, seized by the police before Oyston was arrested, had enabled the Manchester detectives to work out a precise date, 6 June 1992, as the only occasion on which Oyston could possibly have committed the two offences of which he was later convicted. Yet the Crown Prosecution Service framed and delivered an indictment against him which specified that the offences were committed in a different year 1991. Even as late as the seventh day of his trial, Oyston stood accused of two offences committed on one unspecified evening in the period from 4 October 4 1991, to 31 December 1991. But a simple comparison of two documents held by the authorities had made it clear that the only possible date for the offences was 6 June 1992, six months outside the indictment period.
‘Likeliest date’
The meaning of various notes on the calendar and some further notes in a register kept in the black Ostaline notebook had been explained to an officer of the Greater Manchester Police. From 9 February 1995, this officer was aware that the two documents indicated that the ‘likeliest date’ for the alleged offences was outside the wide indictment period. The officer failed to draw this to the attention of the defence, at a time when the law required full disclosure of unused police material. The black notebook was never shown to the defence. Throughout Oyston’s trial at Liverpool Crown Court in May 1996, the police and prosecuting counsel did not put forward the 6 June 1992 date. The rape complainant had always refused to state in what month, season, or even year, the alleged offence had taken place. She said that although she had not objected to having sex with Oyston in Claughton Hall, Oyston would have known that she was forced to accede through fear of the model agency owner who was waiting outside in his car.
The indictment in the case had specified that two offences were committed during and just after a car journey from Manchester to the Oyston’s home at Claughton Hall on a night between 4 October 1991 and 31 December 1991. Oyston’s defence team conducted pre-trial research into his 1991 business diaries and tracked his movements for that year. But seven days into his trial, after inconsistencies appeared in the evidence of the rape complainant, the trial judge agreed to a request from the Crown and allowed the indictment period to be extended by a further twelve months, to run from 4 October 1991 to 31 December 1992. This devalued the research done by Oyston’s defence team who had not investigated his movements for the year of 1992 and were thus at a disadvantage.
The prosecution and the defence agreed that four people made an evening journey from Manchester to Oyston’s home in a car driven by Peter Martin, the owner of a model agency who was later sentenced to 20 years for rape offences. The passengers were Owen Oyston and two women: Lysa Rubotham, whose evidence for the defence was disbelieved by the jury, and the rape complainant, now known as ‘Miss J’. The judge told the jury that one of the two women was lying about what had happened at Claughton Hall. The prosecution refused to specify a date for the journey and the defence lacked sufficient information to suggest one.
Greater Manchester Police had seized from Peter Martin, three months before the arrest of Owen Oyston, a 1992 calendar, known as the ‘flower calendar’ and listed by the police as ‘MJH30D’. This calendar was used by Peter Martin to record his movements, meetings and sexual encounters. It dates the car journey exactly. His business partner, Tracey Grainey, had explained the notation used on the calendar in a police interview on February 8, 1995. The events noted in the ‘flower’ calendar were then compared with notes in a black ‘Ostaline’ brand notebook, used by Tracey Grainey as a register to record the names of people staying overnight at Martin’s home in Sale, which served as a dormitory for his model agency. The police work was carried out by an officer who listed the two documents as R31O and R30O in entries on the police HOLMES computer. Although the two entries are not dated, it is apparent that in February 1995, the officer was checking Martin’s activities against the list of overnight residents at Martin’s home. This was fourteen months before Oyston’s trial. During the period before the trial, Oyston’s defence team repeatedly asked the CPS for an examination of the black Ostaline notebook.
It is clear that the examination of the calendar and the notebook had revealed that Martin, Oyston, Rubotham and ‘Miss J’ had met at the Don Antonio restaurant in Sale on the night of Saturday, 6 June 1992, before travelling to Claughton Hall together later that evening. But the copies of the calendar which were supplied to the defence were too indistinct for the name ‘Don Antonio’ to be distinguished below Martin’s listing of the initials OJO, LR and J. An examination of the ‘Ostaline’ notebook now shows that on that same night, ‘Miss J’ and Lysa Rubotham stayed at the house in Sale.
There was no other occasion in 1991 or 1992 on which the calendar shows Martin meeting Oyston, ‘J’ and Lysa on a night when ‘J’ and Rubotham stayed the night at Martin’s home. Greater Manchester Police carried out this research long before the Oyston trial. By setting the indictment period against Oyston in the year 1991, the police and the CPS made it unlikely that the 1992 ‘flower calendar’ would be closely examined by Oyston’s defence team. Furthermore, the calendar’s full meaning could only be gathered with the help of Peter Martin and Tracey Grainey, who were not involved in the Oyston trial. The police work on the ‘flower calendar’ was not handed over to the Oyston defence team and copies of the calendar handed to the defence did not reveal the true story.
In Wakefield Prison in 2002, Peter Martin explained the notations used in the calendar for the month of June 1992. They reveal that he ‘had a meeting’ on 6 June with Owen Oyston, Lysa Rubotham and ‘Miss J’. On that night, the agency manager, Tracey Grainey, recorded in her register that ‘Miss J’, Lysa Rubotham and several other models stayed overnight at the house in Sale. Therefore, the Crown Prosecution Service and Greater Manchester Police possessed, long before Oyston’s trial, a document from which the only possible date for the alleged crimes could be fixed as 6 June 1992, but allowed the indictment of Oyston to be framed and delivered for the period from 4 October 1991, to 31 December 1991.
The failure of the Crown Prosecution Service to tell the defence that the Crown could fix 6 June 1992, as the date of the car journey looks particularly suspicious when one notes that in later appeal proceedings it was the Crown who put forward June 6 1992, as the likeliest date for the offence. And when solicitors for ‘Miss J’ submitted her statement to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, ‘June 1992’ was again put forward as the likeliest month for the event. Hiding the date of 6 June 1992, looks particularly pernicious when one examines the fresh evidence from May and June 1992 that turned up after Oyston’s conviction. This evidence, never heard by a jury, but rejected by the Appeal Court, proved that ‘Miss J’ could not have been living at the Sale dormitory house, away from her parents and in fear of Peter Martin, in May 1992, as she had stated at the trial.
Part of the fresh evidence was a letter, discovered after Oyston’s conviction, which showed that she had been on holiday in Crete with her parents in May 1992. She had a sexual affair with a young Englishman, who was living on the island, and after the holiday, on 21 May wrote to him from her parents’ home, thirty miles from Martin’s house. The letter makes it clear that she was certainly not living in fear at Peter Martin’s house.
Once the date of 6 June 1992 could be fixed as the only date on which she could have travelled with Lysa Rubotham and Martin to Claughton Hall, a negative pregnancy test that she took on 16 June 1992, became more significant. ‘Miss J’ had said that she took the test because she feared she might have been made pregnant by the boyfriend in Cyprus. Yet the CPS and the police knew, in words they used at the Court of Appeal, that the ‘likeliest date’ for the rape by Oyston was only 9 days before the pregnancy test. And ‘J’ had declared that she had not missed a menstrual period after the alleged rape by Oyston. This presents a serious conflict between the available evidence. How could she be both worried about missing a period after sex with the young man in Cyprus and in the same lunar month relieved that she had not missed a period after being raped by Oyston?
As long as the date for the car journey remained unknown by the defence, this was taken as merely proving that she could not have been raped between 9 May 1992, and 16 June 1992 when she was so concerned about pregnancy that she took the test. But once the car journey could be dated to June 6, the evidence undermined her claim that she had been raped by Oyston. The prosecution and the police gained a huge advantage by not allowing the jury to discover that there was a ‘likeliest date’ for the rape.
Another piece of fresh evidence, never seen by the jury at Oyston’s trial, became important once the date of the car journey could be fixed. This was a greetings card, which ‘Miss J’ admitted giving to Peter Martin and the staff at the model agency. The message written on the card was addressed to Lysa Rubotham, the woman who was supposed to have watched her being raped by Oyston. It was also addressed to Peter Martin, the man who was supposed to have raped her four times before June 1992. The message was ‘Thanks for everything, helping me and getting me sorted out. Love kisses and cuddles. XXXX‘
In court during the trial of Peter Martin, ‘Miss J’ admitted giving the card to Rubotham, Martin and another member of the staff, but claimed she must have given it to them no later than ‘January or early 1992‘, well before the time she said she was raped by Oyston and Martin. The card was later examined by its designer and printer who stated that it was not manufactured, distributed or wholesaled until late June 1992, after the ‘likeliest date’ for the alleged rape by Oyston on 6 June 1992. So ‘Miss J’ must have affectionately addressed this card and personally handed it to Lysa Rubotham and Peter Martin after the ‘likeliest date’ of the rape. Had this evidence been seen by a jury, they could only have convicted Oyston after asking whether a genuine rape victim would conceivably send written thanks to those who had colluded in her rape and humiliation.
Getting Oyston before he got them?
The gradual discovery of the long political conspiracy against Oyston seems to have distracted us from signs that in the last feverish days of the John Major government, there was some form of legal conspiracy to put Oyston behind bars before he could mount legal action against the men who had been conspiring against him for twenty years.
When Dale Campbell-Savours MP raised the case in October 1998, before a Labour Attorney-General in an adjournment debate in the House of Commons, one of the Crown Prosecution Service solicitors on the Oyston case came to the chamber to hear the MP attack his handling of the case.
‘I wish to leave the House with some very simple facts to consider. First, Oyston admits that he had sexual relations with young women. Secondly, he has consistently denied rape, even though that may have adverse implications for parole. Thirdly, no scientific evidence for rape exists. Fourthly, no medical evidence exists. Fifthly, there is no firm date for the offence. Sixthly, the police lost the original interview notes. Seventhly, the incident was not reported until two years after it took place. Eighthly, the accused refused to admit to any sexual activity even though that could have enhanced his prospects of acquittal or brought a lighter sentence. Ninthly, the friend of the victim, Lysa Rubotham, who was present throughout, insists that no rape took place. Tenthly, the victim admitted to being a regular user of hallucinatory drugs. Something is wrong, and I want something done about it.’
The Crown Prosecution Service did nothing about it. Greater Manchester Police even wrote to Campbell-Savours to complain about the words of his warning:
‘I see the danger of future miscarriages of justice, where cases are badly investigated, men are charged with rape and juries convict on the basis of uncorroborated evidence in closely contested cases.’
In 1998, Campbell-Savours was unaware that the Crown Prose-cution Service and the Greater Manchester Police held the flower calendar and the Ostaline notebook and could have used them to date the car journey to Claughton Hall. They at least could have done something about it.
Andrew Rosthorn wrote about the Oyston affair in Lobster 34 and Lobster 35