The glorious failures of Jolyon Maugham

‘You are a predatory cis man and walk into the women’s showers at the gym. You are challenged and pretend to be a trans man. You are disbelieved because your penis is erect but you claim to be post-op and “biologically female”. What then happens? And how does any of this protect women?’

What is this, you might ask? A draft for an AI-driven adult ‘choose your own adventure’ app? No, such deathless prose could only have issued forth from one trembling nib – that of the nation’s favourite KC, Jolyon Maugham. Maugham was expressing his professional disbelief at the finding of the Supreme Court that ‘men and women’ are categories of sex, rather than trans delusion.

What a treat Maugham’s recent Bluesky post is. To think that we may be living in the Indian Summer of Jolyon’s full pomp is melancholy indeed. Maugham is the crusading, Remain-supporting lawyer behind the Good Law Project. The man who takes on every bien pensant cause-cum-case going, and usually loses. It seems his dismal legal record is now being noticed by those formerly disposed to funding his legal challenges. Which would just as effectively have been expressed through contemporary dance. As a result, the treasury at the Good Law Project is much diminished.

But here is proof that, wounded stag though he may be, Maugham is still defiant. And like a dying star, or a sitcom soaring effortlessly over a flotilla of sharks, he is determined to show that he is still capable of delivering the literary goods.

Sadly, it seems Maugham’s legal reputation is irredeemably shot. The stats show that Maugham’s hopes of elevation to the pantheon of truly immortal beloved silks, along with the likes of ‘Gorgeous’ George Carman, are now fading.

So to learn that he is still capable of such writerly flourishes is of great comfort to those of us who enjoy them. His latest effort surely ranks right up there with his 2019 announcement: ‘Already this morning I have killed a fox with a baseball bat. How’s your Boxing Day going?’ A tweet he followed up with the delicious detail that he beat the poor creature to death while wearing his wife’s ‘too small green kimono’.

Maugham’s professional humiliations and fiascos are manifold and enumerating them in detail, even with the garnish of Schadenfreude, would weigh us down. A blog called Labour Pains analysed the Good Law Project’s crowdfunding efforts up to 2022, and found that of the 44 legal cases for which it had raised over £4million in the previous five years, it had won only eight. This is a record that speaks for itself.

Indeed, defeat is so reliably the default outcome of Jolyon’s every quixotic legal sally that the self-regarding title of his legal memoir, Bringing Down Goliath, could hardly be more inaccurate. ‘Bouncing off Goliath’ might have better captured the spirit of his enterprise.

Still, Bringing Down Goliath did succeed in unleashing a landslide of beautifully wrought contempt from professional reviewers and keen amateurs alike. Indeed, I have read several long and lovingly detailed eviscerations of it on Amazon and, I have to say, if all he had to his credit were the unleashing of these near anonymous examples of native talent, it would have been worth it. I heartily commend everything with a single star next to it.

Maugham is thus, like Falstaff, the cause of wit in other men, and there is surely something to be said for that. There is a difference between these two figures, of course. Falstaff is widely adored – celebrated Sicilian novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa once wrote that he would have given up 10 years of his life to spend an hour in Falstaff’s company. No one could say that about Maugham. To find oneself even ascending in the same lift as him would, I suspect, give many of us the heebie-jeebies.

Before Maugham started the Good Law Project, he was a tax lawyer, most famous for assisting celebrities like Gary Barlow in their tax affairs. If, after ‘being for the alleged tax avoiders’, as he once put it, he had later in life become a lawyer working pro bono to redress the iniquity doubtless suffered by the unlettered and unlearned at the hands of the state, he would surely be excused the occasional excursion into cross-dressing vulpicide. But that is not what Maugham has become. He put himself on the side of the elites, not the people. And his legal cunning and dexterity, such as it is, has been brought to bear on attempting to thwart clearly expressed democratic preferences.

Indeed he was himself, along with Gina Miller, at one point the champion of those who decried the Brexit result because that unlearned and unlettered cohort had finally got one over on their so-called betters. They had finally been able to get their voices heard on the issue of Britain’s EU membership, and the likes of Maugham wanted to silence them.

Maugham’s legal fiascos have now deprived his donors of millions of pounds. These are funds they might have used to mitigate their disappointment with the twists and turns of democracy, perhaps with a slap-up fish and chip dinner on the front at Margate.

Maugham serves a very valuable purpose in public life. At a time when political heroes are no sooner upright than they are discovered to have feet not so much of clay as cookie dough, it is reassuring to be reminded that there is someone who is always wrong. Someone who remains as extravagantly mistaken and utterly lacking in self-awareness as ever.

So thank you, Jolyon Maugham. Long may you plonk.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.