Jolyon Maugham, a King’s Counsel, charismatic and successful obscure tax barrister, whose memoir cum social action manifesto Bringing Down Goliath, a product of the bird site, and large portions of it cannot really be understood unless the  reader has followed our hero’s perambulations  through Twitter.

He started a mild successful blog, which led him advising the Labour Party on tax policy and even to fleeting fantasies of becoming attorney general in the House of Lords in an Ed Miliband government. But what really made him famous was hi energetic consistent abuse of anyone who disagreed with him on Twitter  where he has 420, 000 followers, not many  of them barristers since he blocked most of the profession. He really became famous  when to protect his chickens he beat a fox to death with a baseball bat on Boxing Day while wearing his wife’s kimono, then bragged about it on Twitter.

Of the fox, I’ll spare the curious reader the suspense, he does talk about the poor creature in some length. His account of the inner London fox hunts spread across eight pages and ends with him quoting in full, the long statement he issued on Twitter after the RSPCA declined to prosecute him. He compares his cavalry to that of Caroline Flack, the TV presenter bullied into suicide by social media.

The book is divided into two parts. The title of the first, How the System Works, is a misnomer, is a rags to riches personal memoir with a explanation of the British Constitution.

“This is not a chapter and this not a book, for law students or constitutional scholars” he says, and general abuse directed at his profession, the judiciary, and politicians. Politicians are liars, and Judges are “relatively feeble things” who are cowed by the government, especially when they rule against him, which is why Britain needs a written constitution enforced by judges.

Part II is titled Fighting Back, which follows familiar convention of legal memoirs  where the author reminisces about old cases of faded fame. Many cases Maugham writes about were not really his, there is a chapter on Miller 1, on which his role seems to have been limited to crowdfunding some money right before Gina Miller’s case to stop the triggering of Article 50 squeezed out of his own law suit. Maugham professes to be happy that even his non involvement  played a role in history, even though parliament endorsed Brexit, the very thing he was trying to stop, as a result of the case. 

Several chapters are dedicated to cases he brought through the Good Law Project, the Goliath-slaying private company he founded to sue the government with money donated by laymen, with a dismal success rate. One chapter is on judicial review against the awarding of some contracts during Covid. The Judge found part of the process unlawful, but that made no difference to the outcome, and refused to grant declaratory relief, resulting in defeat for Maugham. “The might of the crowd – we had received 16, 000 donations – help us expose a series of transactions that stank of sleaze.” 

Bringing Down Goliath  How Good Law Can Topple the Powerful by Jolyon Maugham, WH Allen £22, 336pages.

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