Bringing Down Goliath: How Good Law Can Topple the Powerful

Product Information

I had a wonderful psychotherapist and I remember her saying to me: ‘But Jolyon, it’s such a waste for you to be unhappy, to live an unhappy life.’ That really resonated with me then and it really resonates with me now. That idea that we can find ways to respond to the world around us that will make us happy, we’re not passive participants in fate imposed on us by others, is really important … Without it our lives in a sense can feel wasted. I don’t want that for anyone. The “Origin Story” chapters give us no more on personal motivation than that his father, after “a sherbet or two,” at last opened up about the deaths he had seen in the War and extracted a promise that 10-year-old Mark would “never, ever, take living in a free country for granted”. Mark has a “sixth sense” that one day the “country would come under threat again” and it was his duty to resist.

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”. Maugham also responded to a letter signed by 150 writers including Rowling, which denounced the “restriction of debate”. With its headcount also growing – from one employee in January last year to an estimated 25 by the end of this year – Maugham is looking to the future and expanding beyond litigation. 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.Good law is difficult and, to most people, rather boring. It does not play well on social media. One benefit of the less highly networked culture of the recent past is that the acquisition of influence tended to be slow, and meritorious; whereas today, a certain kind of status within the ever-growing online legal world can be achieved swiftly, by playing to the cheap seats. So, for the time being at least, it is hard to completely refute Maugham’s clichéd insistence that “the real court is that of public opinion”. Here's something I'm rather conscious of. Accusing someone of being smug, or sensitive, or vain is a very easy thing to do. Those types of insults are very difficult to disprove because any effort to disprove it will own further your association with that characteristic. So when I use it to describe Jolyon Maugham KC's book, I mean for it to be a challengeable position, which ought to be playing out in the readers mind.

The Covid contracts controversy has clearly resonated with the public. This time last year, Maugham says, he was asking Good Law’s director of campaigns if the number of direct debit donors might reach 5,000 by the end of 2020, from fewer than 2,000 at the start of the year and against a target of 3,500. In fact it soared to 11,000, and now there are almost 20,000, he says. 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. Jolyon Maugham KC lashed out after a reviewer said he was “in love with his own prose” and “a first-time author who should not be encouraged to re-offend ever again”. A protester outside the Court of Session in Edinburgh, where Maugham argued in October 2019 that Boris Johnson should seek an extension of article 50. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA MediaMaugham 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. Jolyon Maugham outside the supreme court in London on the second day of the prorogation hearing last year. Photograph: Jean-Francois Pelletier/Alamy And still, from a comprehensive school intake of 226, you are one of two to make it to university. You beat off competition from Boris Johnson to win the party nomination for a safe seat which you hold and then strengthen over successive Parliaments. You become a member of the European Research Group (ERG) and argue for – and from a narrow referendum mandate help extract – a hard break from the United Kingdom’s near 50-year membership of the European Union. And for a time you’re mooted as a possible future leader of the Conservative Party.

For a start, Jolyon Maugham is not quite part of the privileged North London elite that many will have assumed. Maybe he is now, but his account of his dysfunctional childhood and upbringing leaves one impressed he was able to overcome it and forge his career. It’s a reminder that for everyone in public life there’s a real person behind the persona. When we read these stories, our [British] default is to assume that it’s not as bad as it looks, there will be some innocent explanation for it all,” Maugham says. “And so we sort of put it in the drawer marked ‘to worry about later’.” That is resolutely not his style.

The lawyers’ letter was a response to documents leaked to Maugham, which were shared with the press. Having held himself out as someone delivering transparency and accountability, Maugham says: “Behaving consistently with what I set out to do actually is upholding the standards of a courageous, independent bar.” With the news last week of the departure of Dominic Cummings and the promise of a “reset” of Johnson’s government, I wonder if Maugham believes that the culture that resists scrutiny will change? This book highlights significant failings and potential widespread corruption. It shows how the law can prove and challenge but is failing to hold to account. However, as argued in this book, it is beyond its reach or remit. Initially, in turns out that a couple of contracts had been awarded to Tory party donors on terms unfavourable to the government and details not published. We both know I have written to many GC feminists seeking a private discussion of trans issues and to de-escalate the ‘debate’.

Hoffman was also Chairman and Director (unpaid) of Amnesty International Charity Ltd, a satellite of AI. Hoffman’s wife had also worked as an administrator at AI for many years. Given how confused the rest of his writing is, Maugham is strikingly clear on this point. Judicial diversity, for example, is not good if judges simply reflect the population they serve. The “real problem” which diversity must solve is changing the sort of judgments that come down, so that judges take the “political context” into account in the way Maugham likes. A judge who comes from a demographic that makes them close to a “feminism of privilege” (apparently, being older and female?) is likely to issue suspect decisions. Maugham wants a judiciary which speaks not with many voices (which, of course, is the definition of diversity) but rather “a single voice”, presumably one which is in perfect concord with him. Maugham doesn’t mind if his political goals are achieved either by a written constitution (which judges cannot pass) or judges simply judicially inventing one. Mr Maugham claimed that the bad review of Bringing Down Goliath, which explores a series of high-profile cases brought against the Government by his governance watchdog the Good Law Project, was because of where The Times “stands in relation to my politics”. 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,” he wrote. 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.If the government’s experience is anything to go by, the likes of Uber Eats and Deliveroo should probably be looking over their shoulders. Reflecting on this desire to empower others and his personal motivation, Maugham recalls his time in psychotherapy in his late 20s. Her remarks triggered a row as Maugham first suggested Rowling should read his book before turning his sights on her gender-critical views. 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. 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 The Harry Potter author’s remarks triggered a row as Maugham first suggested Rowling should read his book, before turning his sights on her gender-critical views.