Since early 2022, I have used this blog to question the propriety and indeed the morality of the increasingly common practice of grifting large sums of money from understandably outraged but often ill-informed members of the public to pursue sometimes vaguely specified legal claims.

The principal focus of these amateur scribblings has been the (Not Very) Good Law Project, which since 2017 has leveraged Jolyon Maugham’s natural charm and “strong presence on social media” to rake in more than £4.8 million through 59 crowdfunders – and as much as another £10 million in direct donations – without achieving very much for the public good. But I’ve also monitored and written about such crowdfunding by others, as the phenomenon seems to me to raise interesting and important public policy questions, including whether such crowdfunded litigation should be regulated. And some people, including journalists, have found the data that I have collated useful.

Anyway, as of this month I am no longer in gainful employment. The plus side of this is that nutty trade unions can no longer threaten to end their (meagre) funding of my (now former) employer because – *checks notes* – my retweet of the Observer‘s Sonia Sodha has made some of their members “feel unsafe”. On the other hand, I’m a bit stuffed, financially. And someone suggested I crowdfund my work on the crowdfunders.

But that person was daft, because I will continue to do the monitoring, data collection and blogging anyway. Living my values, fighting the power, innit. Indeed, I will try to deliver a monthly Good Grift Watch update via this blog. But I promise never to write a booky wook subtitled How Mediocre Blogging Can Make Filthy Rich Tax (Avoidance) Lawyers Look A Bit Silly.

At the time of writing, everyone is waiting for the outcome of the nasty, illiberal attempt by Jolyon, the GLP and their pet Mermaids to challenge the charitable status of the LGB Alliance, the First-tier Tribunal hearing of which concluded in early November, and for which the GLP crowdfunded £83,692 from 3,104 pronoun people. But even without this ruling I think it’s fair to say that, so far, 2023 hasn’t exactly been a vintage year for Jolyon and the GLP.

Days into the new year, Jolyon had a spectacular falling out with trans activists – a group he and the GLP have successfully courted in recent years – over a blog post about sex work by Charlotte Proudman’s campaign Right 2 Equality, which was launched in November last year “in partnership with the Good Law Project”. Apparently, believing that ‘trans women are women’ axiomatically goes hand in hand with believing that ‘sex work is work’. Or something.

A few days later, the High Court dismissed the GLP’s flagship Trans Healthcare claim, and on 22 February the High Court refused the GLP permission to bring a second judicial review of the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the Partygate investigation, the first having fizzled out in March last year after raking in a stonking £100K for the GLP. The GLP will, of course, seek to appeal in both cases, and has already crowdfunded more than £50,000 to do so in the Trans Healthcare case.

In March, tax (avoidance) lawyer Jolyon drew the ire of many of his former colleagues at the Bar – and disappointed some GLP supporters – by unnecessarily announcing that he will not be prosecuting any eco warriors in the criminal courts. Then, early in April, the non-prosecuting Jolyon had to apologise to the Chair of the Environment Agency after the GLP “over-egged” an allegation about a potential conflict of interest (Jolyon was on holiday at the time, dontcha know). And the very same day, the Supreme Court refused the GLP permission to appeal the Court of Appeal’s dismissal, in December, of their flagship Ministerial emails case. Moreover, ruling that the GLP’s application “did not raise an arguable point of law”, the Court ordered the GLP to pay the Government’s legal costs.

Later the same week, Jolyon had a very public sense of humour failure when the Times and others trashed his new booky wook and its fantabulous opening sentence. As Jolyon’s fellow barrister Adam King noted in Unherd, “Bringing Down Goliath is a bold title for a tale in which Goliath suffers nothing worse than the occasional stubbed toe”. Thank goodness Jolyon doesn’t really care about sales.

The cruellest month then came to an end with another drive-by shooting of Jolyon, this time by himself in a car-crash interview in the Sunday Times. This concluded that, while Jolyon may have “landed some blows on the Government during Brexit and Covid”, his opponents “have ultimately benefitted from having this brilliant but bumptious bourgeois caricature as a useful enemy. When all is said and done Maugham might have inflicted his worst damage on the poor fox”. Oof!

Inevitably, and rather sweetly, this induced another sense of humour failure – scientists have yet to build a device capable of accurately measuring the thinness of Jolyon’s skin. One of Jolyon’s friends really ought to tell him that the trick is actually not to care – oh, hang on, they did. And then the merry month of May began with the Critic magazine noting that, as well as being mad and bad, Jolyon’s book is actually dangerous to know:

On my (woe is me) second reading of [Bringing Down Goliath], as I tried my best to approach this as a serious ideological document, Maugham’s view of the judiciary increasingly seemed to me to resemble that advanced (with similar bloviating and tedium) by Chinese president Xi Jinping. The Chinese Communist Party is eager to tout its commitment to the ‘rule of law’, by which they really mean rule by law.

The never angry or abusive Jolyon promptly dismissed all of the above as “parasitic bottom feeder pieces”, and later the same week he let it be known that he had been trying (but seemingly failing) to lawyer up in relation to the Sunday Times interview. He then failed to be Zen about a tweet by former colleague Roddy Dunlop KC. The thing about actually not caring is that you have to actually not care.

June then began with the Supreme Court refusing permission in the River Wye case, for which the GLP had crowdfunded £53,195 plus £40,000 of match-funding from multi-millionaire fashion victim Dale Vince. And, as that is some £75,000 more than the less than £20,000 that the GLP originally said it would cost to apply for permission, the case was at least a nice little earner for the GLP.

Which is fortunate, as overall the GLP’s crowdfunded income has continued to slide, from a monthly average of some £155,000 in 2021/22, and more than £75,000 in the first quarter of 2022/23 (February to April 2022), to just £43,493 in the first quarter of 2023/24 (February to April 2023).

And last week the Family Division of the High Court dismissed the wardship application made by Article 39 in the Unaccompanied asylum seeking children case, for which the GLP has (so far) crowdfunded £36,228. This led to the first known sighting of the rare Humble Jolyon.

On the other hand, the bumptious bourgeois bloviating Jolyon and his GLP helped get a local planning decision overturned by the Supreme Court. So at least some NIMBYs are happy. And, thanks to a series of large, anonymous donations by one or more wealthy citizens, they funded Nina Cresswell’s successful defence of a libel claim. And all this stunning success with a mere 50 staff!

Anyway, here’s my updated Table of Failure & Futility (TOFF), showing the sum raised by and outcome to date of the GLP’s 59 crowdfunders since 2017, including a new one this month targeting the General Medical Council, and the latest one targeting the taxation of private equity fund managers that, according to the Oxford Emeritus Professor of Tax Law, is “very strange” and “almost certainly doomed to fail”. Time – and one of my monthly Good Grift Watch updates! – will tell.

[Update, October 2023: Good Grift Watch update #1, covering June 2023, is here; Update #2, covering July 2023, is here; and Update #3, covering August 2023, is here. Further updates will follow on a bi-monthly or quarterly basis.]

Update, 14 June: No sooner had I published this post than the GLP closed two of their longstanding but moribund crowdfunders: Bunzl Healthcare (launched in April 2021), and Immensa testing (October 2021). In July 2022, the GLP had successfully sought a costs capping order in Bunzl Healthcare, but they never bothered to inform potential new donors of this material fact – the crowdfunder was last updated in February 2022, when “the Government [was] trying to price us out”. And, suffice to say, little if anything has been achieved with the total of £166,401 raked in by these two crowdfunders.