Maugham’s cases have occasionally succeeded. In 2019, he had a hand in the application that led to the Scottish Court’s ruling that Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament was unlawful. Unfortunately, two hours later, the High Court in London gave its reasons for having rebuffed Gina Miller’s plea for the same decision five days earlier. It rather overshadowed Maugham’s efforts, much to his irritation: “The decision of Scotland’s highest court made barely a ripple in the national press. The BBC made room for a single interview with me on its news channel.”

Nevertheless, his work here was arguably of public benefit. I have heard persuasive moral defences of Boris Johnson’s 2019 prorogation of Parliament, but most lawyers, even on the Right, saw it as a constitutional travesty, and one that could have set a dangerous precedent.

More often, though, the GLP loses, which costs them. Last year, they were ordered to pay more than £350,000 to the Government Legal Department to cover the expense of defending failed GLP claims. This sum was mainly crowdfunded from small donors. People are free to donate as they please, of course, but questions about transparency — a virtue vaunted by the GLP — continue to swirl. When the High Court rules that your claim “fails in its entirety”, and orders you to pay 80% of the other side’s costs, as they did to the Good Law Project in their Covid appointments action, is it really ethical to spin that outcome to donors as an unalloyed victory — as having won “at every substantive level”? Yes, all right, Maugham’s co-claimant got part of what he wanted (a limited “declaration”), but both of them failed to persuade the court of the headline allegation of “cronyism”. Never — ever — to be deterred, Maugham insists that this failure was only at “a deeply technical level”, now a droll euphemism for a forensic spanking.

Indeed, the judgment in that case could be seen as paving the way for tighter restrictions on who can bring a claim for Judicial Review, which is the GLP’s modus operandi. The requirement that a claimant has to have a “sufficient interest” in the impugned decision has long been interpreted generously, in favour of campaigning groups and the like. But Maugham’s scattergun shirtiness and unabashed politicising has severely tested that generosity. Lord Reed, now president of the Supreme Court, said in 2012 that “a distinction must be drawn between the mere busybody and the person affected by or having a reasonable concern in the matter”. Thanks to the GLP’s busybodying, successive Lord Chancellors have threatened to tighten up the “sufficient interest” test, in a way that is unlikely to benefit the public. Is this what the Good Law Project is for?

Fortunately, the Napoleonic ambition of Maugham’s project looks beyond the law of Judicial Review. The GLP is now planning legal action against Instagram’s parent company, Meta, for irresponsible advertising to children. They have instructed a “global law firm” to “scan Europe for the best jurisdictions in which to litigate”. “We don’t know whether the case will win,” Maugham adds.

Thank goodness, then, that a “better metric” than success-rate, as he informs the reader, is “the frequency and aggression of the attacks directed against us by Government ministers”. Rishi Sunak once named him 10 times in a press release on plans to put tighter limits on “lawfare” — as Jolyon tells us at least three times. One gets a sense that here is where he gets his kicks. “There is no greater compliment you can be paid by the power you challenge than to force it to speak your name, to breathe into your lungs the air of power, of saliency”.

With his beady lawyer’s eye, Maugham identifies wrongdoing and forces Tory ministers to stop cheating, or so the story goes. But Bringing Down Goliath is a bold title for a tale in which Goliath suffers nothing worse than the occasional stubbed toe. Towards the end of the book, the myth-making gives way to something closer to reality. Referring to their litigation over the procurement of PPE during the pandemic, Maugham writes: “we generated literally thousands of pieces of mainstream, national media coverage about the scandal… Against that background, the ultimate decision in the case was almost irrelevant.” And so he admits what many have long suspected: the Good Law Project sees the Administrative courts as Just Stop Oil sees snooker tables — as a platform for attention-seeking.

Suggested reading

Let's scrap the Human Rights Act

By John Gray

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.

Some who have paid attention to the sententious verbiage, the heavy-worn learning, the big head on narrow shoulders, compare Maugham to a windy little vicar from a 19th-century novel. For others, the fictional character most readily called to mind by his obsessive score-settling and unbending devotion to status — so much dinner, with so many very senior civil servants — is Alan Partridge. “Giving a speech on receiving the Praeses Elit in Dublin,” begins one of Maugham’s sentences, before it clarifies: “a prize awarded to those who have advanced the discourse in their line of work and are a source of inspiration to young people”. On this occasion, he “reflected on Gandalf standing on the bridge at Khazad-dûm in The Lord of The Rings. The fiery twin-horned Balrog approaches. And, although Gandalf knows the Balrog is too much for him, he plants his staff on the bridge and he says: ‘You shall not pass’.” As with Partridge, so with Maugham: he is much funnier than he intends to be.

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”.

We may look to the future with some foreboding, then; but for the GLP, it seems bright. Big plans are underway, involving tech platforms, shareable legal advice, and “ready-made legal structures” to provide “new ways for communities to live and be”. Though Maugham admits that he “can’t claim to have built a social movement”, that is clearly where his ambitions lie. And if he fails, well, the publicity generated in the attempt will render it a success — although perhaps not on a deeply technical level.

It had been an unusual trial. In protest cases, it is not uncommon to find defendants who choose to go without an advocate, since those defending themselves are, quite rightly, given a little more latitude than lawyers. Usually, protesters’ evidence about their beliefs is kept short, for the sake of time and simplicity, or even proscribed altogether, when the limits of any “reasonable excuse” defence can easily be determined in advance. But the defendants here, with the agreement of all parties, were allowed to explain their motivations at considerable length. The jury heard nearly four hours of evidence about the science of climate change, its consequences, and government policy.

All of which turned out to be, strictly speaking, irrelevant. Because once the evidence had been heard, the court decided that, on all the facts of the case, the “reasonable excuse” defence did not allow for a protest at the top of this bridge.

The right to protest is an important one, protected first by our Common Law and then by the European Convention. But there must be limits, even where no violence is used and no damage caused. Those limits in the British courts, though, are surprisingly hard to discern.

At least part of the reason for the judge’s ruling was that the public has no general right to access the Dartford Bridge, much less to climb it. Indeed, it is a criminal offence even to walk onto it. For protests on other roads, a jury might, depending on circumstances such as how long the disruption lasts, be told that the question of reasonableness is up to them.

Nevertheless, the unrepresented defendant was not prevented from asking the jury to find that their actions were reasonable — and so I was not prevented from arguing that they were not.

More from this author

Is it illegal to insult Captain Tom?

By Adam King

Anyone facing conviction and imprisonment ought, surely, to be permitted to give reasons for their actions, even if those reasons do not amount to a legal justification. If you are caught with a knife, no court would seek to prevent you from telling the jury that you forgot it was in your pocket — despite the fact that the appeal courts have decided that forgetting is no defence. But should a Crown Court be expected to put aside several hours for evidence about climate change? There are 60,000 cases in the queue after all.

But attempts to shut down environmental discourse in court have not ended well. David Nixon, who in his trial ignored a judge’s direction not to refer to climate change, and then refused to apologise, was recently sentenced to eight weeks’ imprisonment. Unapologetic contempt of court must be punished, sometimes harshly, but the general view at the Bar is that the justice system was not the winner there. The case made the courts look harsher than they are.

Judges are in a difficult position, because the law is a mess. The main problem is how to interpret a “reasonable excuse” defence when a defendant’s rights to Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Assembly are engaged. The uncertainty became a problem, in 2018, in an appeal from a Magistrates Court trial about a protest at an arms fair. The District Judge had decided that the obstruction of a highway was reasonable, and therefore not criminal, because — in essence — the protest was peaceful, orderly, worthy, and short. Nothing hugely problematic about that.

But the Crown felt that the judge’s reasoning had gone awry, so appealed the acquittal. And in the course of agreeing with that complaint, the High Court introduced an idea that has complicated things ever since. When judges have to determine whether a law is compatible with the European Convention, they have to perform a “proportionality assessment”, and the High Court said that, in protest cases, a proportionality assessment could simply replace the question of reasonableness. The trouble is, proportionality assessments are very, very complex.

The case then went to the Supreme Court, which condoned the use of proportionality assessments. They also suggested — somewhat offhand and in passing, it seems to me — that this task could be carried out not only by magistrates but also by a jury. Even the most die-hard of activist lawyers see that move as, well, innovative. And many of the rest find it completely bananas. Juries cannot sensibly be asked to perform legal analyses that High Court judges might take days to decide. The result is that it has become very difficult for those attending a protest to gauge their level of exposure to criminal liability.

There are some, of course, who appear to think that there should be no limits on non-violent, yet disruptive, climate protests. A month ago, a few days before the Dartford bridge trial began, Jolyon Maugham KC and others signed and publicised a declaration entitled “LAWYERS ARE RESPONSIBLE”, in which they asserted, among other things, that they would “withhold their services in respect of action against climate protesters exercising their democratic right of peaceful protest”.

There are a number of problems with this approach. First of all, most of the signatories are solicitors, who unless they apply to join the Crown Prosecution Service are in no danger of being asked to prosecute anything. And none of the handful of barristers who signed, I am fairly sure, is on the CPS advocates list, so they too are quite safe. Moreover, although the declaration does not actually go so far as to say in terms that these cases ought not to be prosecuted by anyone, that is the clear implication of a declaration of “conscience” — that is, of what they believe to be the morally correct attitude.

Maugham, of course, punched it all up in the Guardian. “Sometimes the law is wrong”, he noted sagely. Well, yes. But by what mechanism should the enforcement of the law be changed? By Parliament, and the law being applied the same to everybody? Or by the whims of barristers’ consciences?

Suggested reading

The truth about eco-fascism

By Paul Kingsnorth

A solid causative link between “climate justice”, however you choose to define it, and stopping your fellow citizens from moving about has not yet fully revealed itself to me, even acknowledging the “press attention” argument. But I would have happily and vigorously defended the Dartford protesters, just as I defend people accused of much more unpleasant crimes.

The so-called “Cab Rank” rule, according to which barristers cannot turn down cases, should discourage the public from identifying lawyers with their clients. If you know that a barrister could have refused to act for an unpopular client, you are more likely to believe that he or she approves of their actions. But it seems that the administration of justice could benefit from raising awareness of this traditional, non-partisan approach to barristers’ work: Insulate Britain, for example, has threatened to prosecute me “in the years to come”.

This is an alarming development in activists’ attitude to the Rule of Law. And since climate protest is on the rise, with enormous Extinction Rebellion protests planned for this weekend, the administration of justice — the fair application of the current law to all citizens — must not be undermined.

Trowland and Decker have just been handed sentences much stiffer than climate protesters have been used to receiving. While this may well have some deterrent effect, the actions of Just Stop Oil and similar groups are not going to abate any time soon. Both protesters and the public need to know how the law will balance their respective rights, and in what circumstances. Climate change is an issue of great public concern, but the criminal courts are not the forum for litigating government policy from first principles.

“Without the support network that I have, I am not sure I would be here to tell the story, to give this interview today” a noticeably subdued looking Maugham told the nation, who then compared himself with the television presenter Caroline Flack. Flack had taken her own life having suffered an avalanche of hostile publicity after being charged with an assault on her boyfriend. Maugham was suggesting he too had contemplated something similar after falling vertiginously from EU defending ‘hero’ to cross-dressing fox killer.

Thank you for @BBCr4today for inviting me on – at 7.40am – to discuss how it feels to be at the heart of a media hatestorm. https://t.co/K19e4qzOfn

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) March 9, 2020

Spiked immediately called out his ‘shameless hypocrisy‘. And yes, hypocrisy there was. Maugham hasn’t been shy of orchestrating a social media pile-on himself, and used all his considerable legal clout to pursue young BeLeave founder Darren Grimes though the courts with all the sympathy of a chasing pack of hounds.

The instinct to say that Maugham deserves all he got is undeniably powerful. He had it coming. I know why people feel that way. But something else needs to be said here too, something about the redemptive power of disgrace. Maybe that sounds too grand, too theological; but I have met quite a number of disgraced people in my time, and I find that their experience often changes them very much for the better. The charge of hypocrisy no longer quite sticks.

Suggested reading

How I found God on Twitter

By Darren Grimes

I received an unsolicited communication from a well-known book publisher the other day. We are thinking about commissioning a book on hypocrisy, it went, and we thought you’d be the perfect person to write it. I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended.

But they were correct to guess that this is a subject that fascinates me, not least because the whole question of hypocrisy focuses attention on that gap between how we present ourselves publicly, and the reality of our actual lives. This gap exists even in the most apparently morally punctilious among us — perhaps especially so. Yes, for some of us the gap is negligible. But, for others, the elastic that holds together the public and the private is stretched to near breaking point. Perhaps this is why many unconsciously long to be exposed, the tension unbearable, the release longed for. Lies are a weight to carry. And there is often much relief in being able to lay down the burden of deceit.

A new series of Confessions begins again next week. And this seems like a good point to take stock of what I have learnt, not least as it applies to the very notion of confession and what sense it might make in a generally post-religious world. The Confessions title is a bit of a tease, of course. Yes, some guests have made personal revelations. I won’t ever think of Bondi Beach in the same way again after Iain Dale’s account of an encounter there. But though this kind of stuff is fun, it is absolutely not the point of the podcast.

What we can learn from the disgraced

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Partly, Confessions is a way of exploring interesting people’s big ideas. What also fascinates me about my guests, most of whom live under the bright sun of public gaze, is how they negotiate the relationship between what they profess and who they are. And this is tricky territory, not least because the public gaze is often unspeakably cruel, wanting to expose and punish people for tensions that exist within their own lives.

A number of Confessions fans have challenged me that I am insufficiently robust at interrogating those contradictions within the lives of my guests. Partly, this is because I do not believe I have earned the right to do so. I am a priest first of all, not a journalist. And the role of self-appointed public prosecutor is not one I have any appetite for. Indeed, I rather despise the species of journalism that exposes, with mock horror and fake surprise, the fissures upon which all human life is precariously poised. And its talk of ‘morality’ is mostly a cover for cruelty.

Suggested reading

Spare us the bedtime morality tales

By Giles Fraser

Most of us do not have bodies buried under the patio so to speak, and we are not all pretending to be something else. The words attributed to the former Times foreign correspondent Louis Heren, “When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself, why is this lying bastard lying to me”, represents an approach to the search for truth that presumes the worst of human beings. And this distorts the fact that most people are trying to do the right thing, however compromised we may sometimes be. Nonetheless, the human condition is richly variegated, and the different parts of our lives don’t always fit neatly together.

In other words, the exposé doesn’t necessarily tell the whole truth. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in his Letters and Papers from Prison (arguably, the holiest book of the 20th century) there is a certain journalistic model which insists that it is only when a prominent person is exposed in their underpants or bath that the truth about them is revealed. This is often terribly misleading. The truth of a human life is often far more open to view when it is laid out as an extended narrative, as a life lived; it is just as much a horizontal phenomenon as a vertical one.

And, I hope, this manner of approach — my manner of approach — elicits the sympathy of the audience as much as it generates fresh perspectives. It is particularly pleasing when a listener describes their surprise at discovering how much they identify with someone with whom they thought they had little in common. This too is the bearer of truth, and one that challenges the audience as much as the guest.

This week we recorded Rev Jonathan Aitken’s Confession. Aitken was a former Conservative minister who served a number of months at Her Majesty’s pleasure after perjuring himself on oath (and on the Bible) after lying about who paid his hotel bill at the Ritz in Paris. Doubling down in his denial, Aitken famously took the Guardian to court: “If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent a twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play, so be it.” Aitken, of course, was lying. But the Guardian’s exposure of his deception, though absolutely the correct thing to do, was only the beginning of the story.

Suggested reading

How the Church lost its flock over Brexit

By Giles Fraser

The Reverend Jonathan Aitken now takes confessions himself, sometimes in Pentonville prison, where he serves as a chaplain. And I suspect that he is just the sort of person the lags are queuing up to confess to. After all, what better person with whom to share one’s sins than a man who knows a thing or two about having been there himself. Someone who can speak about judgment without being themselves judgmental — isn’t that precisely what we want from a confessor?

This is not supposed to be any sort of defence of Jolyan Maugham. I have used his example to speak in generalities. But if you can filter out that shrill cry of hypocrisy for just a moment, there is often a kind of wisdom that accompanies disgrace which we all might benefit from listening to.

I find the disgraced generally kinder people: more forgiving. Wouldn’t it be something if Maugham could find it within himself to say sorry for his own persecutory behaviour? But it’s more than this. Disgrace tends to release people from the hypocrisy-inducing effects of personal ambition and excessive self-regard. And the experience of disgrace allows people to finally come clean about who they really are. “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found” wrote the psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott. That perfectly describes the dynamics of confession.

Remember the game of hide and seek you played as a child? On the one hand, you don’t want to be found – that is the point of the game. But also, nor do you want people to give up looking for you — not caring enough to come and find you. In psychoanalytic terms, hiding is a strategy of protection. And an understandable one given the threats that exists out there. But not being found is worse. This is the territory that the confession inhabits. It is all about the tension that exists between wanting to be recognised and yet feeling there is something unbearable about this too.

In public life, this tension is exacerbated by the heightened threat of public opprobrium for transgression. And so public figures are obliged to negotiate an exaggerated version of hide and seek, and in their struggles with this game they reveal in bold a similar tension that is at work within us all.

You may call it hypocrisy. I call it being human.