Bringing Down Goliath: How Good Law Can Topple the Powerful

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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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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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”.

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. 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. 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. A revealing, empowering vision of how the law can work better for all of us, from Jolyon Maugham KC, founder of Good Law Project.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. 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. 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”. 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.

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! 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. 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. 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. 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”.

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. 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. 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.Hoffman sat as a Law Lord in the extradition case of Augusto Pinochet.That case had been brought to the House of Lords by Amnesty International (AI) and others. Rowling rejected the suggestion that she was aware of his attempts to engage in discussions about gender issues with other feminists. In Bringing Down Goliath, Jolyon Maugham shares his inspiration and his purpose, and he reveals the story behind these landmark cases and the hidden fault lines of our judicial system. He offers an empowering, bold new vision for how the law can work better for all of us in the fight against injustice. 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”.