I was leaving the CNN presidential election night party at dawn in 2016, having celebrated Donald Trump’s victory, when Paul Staines, then the editor of Guido Fawkes, turned to me and asked: ‘Are we the baddies?’ This was a reference to a Mitchell and Webb sketch set during the second world war in which the question is asked by one Nazi of another. I assured him we were not, but it was a genuine moment of self-reflection on Paul’s part, not a joke.
I don’t suppose Jolyon Maugham KC has ever been afflicted by such doubts, even after bludgeoning a fox to death with a baseball bat in 2019. Scarcely a week passes without the social justice warrior trying to drag someone into court or lodging an official complaint about them. In the past few months, his campaigning organisation, the Good Law Project (GLP), has submitted a complaint to the Charity Commission about Policy Exchange (‘transphobic campaigning’), to Ofcom about TalkTV (‘climate misinformation’), to the Information Commissioner about Protect and Teach (‘privacy policy’), and fired off a flurry of legal letters to different Whitehall departments. His prosecutorial zeal is boundless – he’s the Torquemada of Wokus Dei.
These attempts at ‘activism’ almost always fail, with the GLP often having to pay the other side’s costs. Indeed, a glance at its accounts shows that it spent £942,790 on litigation in 2023/24 and recovered a grand total of £467 in costs. In 2024/25, it spent £692,780 and recovered precisely zero. But that doesn’t seem to matter to the former tax barrister. The point, as far as I can tell, is to make life as miserable as possible for his political opponents, and in this he is successful. Having to fend off these attempts to ruin them, or destroy their professional reputations, is expensive, all-consuming and exhausting.
Take Sarah Phillimore, a barrister who believes in the biological reality of sex. She has just been exonerated by the Bar Standards Board (BSB) after the GLP complained that sharing her gender-critical views on social media was a breach of her professional duty to uphold public trust. The complaint was dismissed on all counts, but Phillimore had to spend the best part of a year fighting her corner. And her ordeal isn’t over. Jolyon has vowed to escalate his complaint to an ‘independent reviewer’ and, if that fails, bring a judicial review against the BSB.
You’d think he’d hesitate before threatening another such review, given his track record. The GLP’s application for a judicial review against the Equality and Human Rights Commission was thrown out by the High Court in February on the grounds that the GLP lacked the standing to bring a claim – in legal parlance, it was found to be a ‘busybody’.
To ordinary mortals, these setbacks might serve as a reality check, but Jolyon was back in front of the GLP’s donors a few days after the High Court decision, asking for money to cover its losses and launch an appeal. ‘Litigation is not cheap,’ said the email. ‘They think a big bill is going to stop us, because we’re not backed by billionaires or the government. But they’re wrong.’
Maugham’s prosecutorial zeal is boundless – he’s the Torquemada of Wokus Dei
This David-and-Goliath motif will be familiar to Jolyon’s social media followers on Bluesky, but it’s a little misleading. In addition to its small donors, the GLP has received support from Dale Vince, the Ecotricity founder worth more than £100 million, and the Lund Trust, which was setup by Lisbet Rausing, scion of the billionaire Rausing family.
Another look at the GLP’s annual accounts reveals that £1,709,135 of the money it raised in 2024/25 went on salaries. Jolyon is no longer a practising barrister, so could this be his only source of income? Yet I hesitate to call him a grifter. His left-wing fanaticism seems real enough. Last week, he endorsed Bash Back, the pro-trans ‘direct action’ group responsible for vandalising the constituency office of Wes Streeting, disrupting a feminist conference in Brighton, daubing graffiti on the EHRC’s headquarters and launching a cyber attack on the Free Speech Union. He described these antics as a ‘legitimate response to a society whose institutions, politics and media systematically dehumanise trans people’.
He signed off that Bluesky post with ‘No pasarán’, the slogan of those who fought Franco’s fascists in Spain. In Jolyon’s eyes, we’re the baddies, not extreme criminal protest groups like Bash Back, and certainly not him. But if you’re so convinced of the righteousness of your cause that you’re prepared to use any means necessary to advance it, maybe you’re not the goodie you think you are.
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