Bringing Down Goliath: How Good Law Can Topple the Powerful

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Thus is the words of BBC’s then Legal Affairs Correspondent, Joshua Rosenberg, “ The Hoffman affair must have done great damage to the International reputation of the English judiciary “. How right he was! This is, surprisingly, not hypocrisy. Like many convinced of their own righteousness, Maugham arrives at a seemingly hypocritical conclusion by fanatical sincerity. The explanation for these contradictions is simply that, to Maugham, ideology is the first condition of judging, and the law is merely an instrumentality to achieve his preferred political ends. A good judge, to Maugham, is a judge who will implement Maugham’s preferred political outcomes. Maugham wrote: “We both know the review has got nothing to do with the quality of the book and everything to do with what The Times is - and where it stands in relation to my politics - which is exactly the point my tweet makes. As a youngster, Maugham says, he never doubted that he would be successful. And if we adopt his definition of success — basically, winding people up ‘til they slag you off — he was correct. It is his insistence that he is, and was at all relevant times, right that precipitates much of the text of this work. (“Of course I get stuff wrong sometimes,” he concedes, but details are not shared.) Journalists who upset him, colleagues who question him, solicitors who take against him, and of course judges who find against him: they all have their turpitude explained to them, in painstaking detail. This book has a central and unfulfilled purpose in common with the Good Law Project itself: the protection and improvement of the reputation of Jolyon Maugham KC. He gained notoriety when he brought a series of high-profile cases against the Government through the Good Law Project. This included legal action over the procurement of PPE and the employment of a PR agency with Tory links to work on Covid-19 communications at the height of the pandemic.

He claimed that gender-critical feminists - who believe sex is biological and cannot be changed - had rejected his offers to debate the issue with him. Anyone on this thread who believes that wasting billions – documented by the government’s own watchdog – on overpriced, unsuitable equipment is a good idea needs to have their heads examined. I expected not to agree with this book, and I don't. I expected it to be badly written, and it often is. Yet it’s not a bad book, and reading it is certainly revealing.Imagine yourself, if you will, Mark Francois. A working-class lad – born to a mother who comes from Italy to work as an au pair and a dad who becomes a heating engineer after being demobilised from a stoker on a coal-fired minesweeper. At 14 your father dies suddenly and your mother becomes clinically depressed. Besides studying for your O and A-levels you become her carer – in between her visits to psychiatric wards.

When this was revealed, and because of possible accusations of bias, it meant the UNPRECEDENTED setting aside of the House of Lords judgement, because in the words of another Law Lord, Lord Hutton:” public confidence in the integrity of the administration of Justice would be shaken if his Hoffman’s) decision was allowed to stand”. Taxation law specialist Maugham was widely condemned in 2019 after claiming he had “killed a fox with a baseball bat” while wearing his wife's kimono in his garden on Boxing Day. Every line of that potted autobiography in the Guardian seems revealing of how Maugham might now be moved to uncover uncomfortable truths. He has maintained a distant relationship with Benedictus, who reminds him, he says, of Boris Johnson – “that same Etonian thing”. He is reconciled to a “loving relationship I would never have thought possible” with his mother and stepfather, but only after “several years with a brilliant psychotherapist, Paula Barnby, who led me to what I can only describe as an epiphany”. When we read these stories, our default is to assume it’s not as bad as it looks, there will be some innocent explanation Such shifts will not have gone unnoticed in government. Last week Maugham revealed the results of more freedom of information requests, which exposed a desperate behind-the-scenes paper trail, involving the army and the Department of Health, to assemble some vestige of a defence for another PestFix contract. He is confident that by the time of the hearing next February, many more such cases will have surfaced.

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Jolyon Maugham outside the supreme court in London on the second day of the prorogation hearing last year. Photograph: Jean-Francois Pelletier/Alamy For much of this year he has been dismayed at the reluctance of large parts of the media to share his litigious anger about government secrecy. In recent weeks, he has sensed that opinion shifting. Even the Daily Mail, which led the hounding of “the fox-killing barrister”, has started giving in-depth coverage to the Good Law Project’s procurement findings, suggesting a change of editorial heart as to who or what might actually represent “the enemy of the people”. The latter cases form part of the material behind this week’s explosive National Audit Office Report, which revealed how suppliers with favourable political connections have been directed to a “high priority channel” for government contracts, giving them ten times more chance of success. The report appears to vindicate what has been a stubborn gathering of evidence by Maugham and others over many months. Jolyon Maugham’s revealing account of his life and career exposes a flawed world view so common to lawyers

But the fundamental difficulty with the worldview of this book is the belief common to so many lawyers, which is that everything is resolvable by legal means. He seems blind to economic and political realities: it’s not clear that he gets the economic point of the non-dom tax rules, and he seems proud of destroying Uber’s business model and of making it more difficult for ordinary Londoners to get taxis late at night. After finishing school, Maugham came to England and stayed with his maternal grandfather in the north-east. He met his natural father for the first time, and Benedictus pulled in some favours to get him a clerical job at the BBC. From there, having written a play that was accepted by Radio 4, he won a place to study for a law degree at Durham University. Maugham believes, without evidence, that Cummings was instrumental in briefing against him and his work to the BBC. Certainly it is striking that, over the past four years of wall-to-wall Brexit talking heads, there appears to have been an unexplained ban on invitations to Maugham, though he has been a pivotal figure in many of its debates. Only the second occasion on which he has ever been interviewed by the Today programme came earlier this year after what his office has learned to call TIWTF: the incident with the fox.Dr Julia Patterson, leader of EveryDoctor. Photograph: Carla Watkins Business & Branding Photography The political landscape is increasingly polarised, almost tribal. This book covers one arm of the state (The law) challenging the legislator ( the incumbent government). Today, challenging or holding to account the government doesn’t give rise to debate, it entrenches people’s beliefs. Often, these are based on nothing more than holding faith and facts in the same regard. If you like or see your identity in the reflection of this government then you will not like the challenge this book documents. Stewart Wood, Lord Wood of Anfield, former adviser to Gordon Brown during the financial crash and fellow in the practice of government at Magdalen College Oxford, is a board member of the Good Law Project. He agreed to work with Maugham because he knows at first hand that “our unwritten constitution with gentlemanly rules is fine until someone comes along and doesn’t observe the rules”. When I spoke to him, Wood suggested that as a result of the prorogation case last year, the Good Law Project could become a significant player in politics. “It’s like a band that had a novelty hit, but then wanted to get on and do the stuff that it really cared about,” he says.