The loser: Michael Carroll

A former binman, Michael Carroll, won £9.7 million in 2002 when he was 19 and electronically tagged for drunk and disorderly behaviour. He already had several convictions for joyriding, theft and criminal damage and was immediately dubbed the “lotto lout”.

Carroll took to spending £2,000 a day on crack and terrorising the genteel Norfolk town of Swaffham with drug-fuelled parties, crashing dozens of cars in his back yard. In 2006 he was sentenced to nine months in jail for affray after barging into a Christian disco and threatening teenagers with a baseball bat.

Since then he has been the subject of the documentary Michael Carroll: King of Chavs, and was reported to have spent more than £8 million of his fortune within four years. In his autobiography he boasts: “I am on my way to chalking up a thousand-plus birds.”

But it also includes a number of his poems, including a tribute to his Aunt Kelly, whom Carroll believes will help him to move closer to the straight and narrow:

“She does all of my washing, she cooks me loads of meals/ She helps me with investments and oversees my deals.”

The winner: Pat Griffiths

Pat Griffiths, 48, of Abergavenny, South Wales, won £8.4 million in 2004. The first news of the win went to the local weekly newspaper, the Abergavenny Chronicle, which Ms Griffiths had edited until then. She opted to give up the job and invest in the family’s 148-acre hill farm, which had been badly hit by the foot-and-mouth crisis.

Shortly before their win, the family had struggled to buy a second-hand tractor for the farm; a year later Ms Griffiths said she had been too busy on the farm to spend much of her fortune.

Five years after winning, she and her husband and two student sons still live in the same house. “Why would we want to move?” she says. “We already live in paradise on earth.”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Baroness Ashton: EU couldn’t make it up
• The other belles de nos jours
• Why too much of a good thing is bad for you