I wasn’t intending to post another Good Grift Watch update until early February but, thanks mainly to Jolyon Maugham’s Big Christmas Meltdown, December turned out to be such a bumper month of grifting madness that I’ve fired up the laptop a month early.

December 2023 in brief

• TV presenter Chris Packham launched a crowdfunder in support of his legal challenge to the Government’s decision to abandon a number of key Net Zero targets
  
• Jolyon Maugham and his Good Law Project falsely accused the tech company Palantir of hiring public relations agency Topham Guerin to pay ‘influencers’ to ‘attack the GLP on social media over the Christmas period’
  
• Jolyon Maugham implicitly but unjustly threatened an academic, Michael Foran, with libel action after Dr Foran criticised the GLP’s approach to crowdfunded litigation on social media
  
• The beleaguered GLP posted and then deleted an incomplete new crowdfunder in support of their private prosecution of an unidentified PPE maker, but not before accepting my £6.66 donation

Chris Packham’s Net Zero Targets case

On 4 December the television presenter, campaigner and RSPCA President Chris Packham launched a Crowdjustice crowdfunder, with an initial target of £75,000, to cover the legal costs of launching a judicial review of the Government’s decisions to “abandon statutory green pledges made in its latest carbon budget to keep the UK on target for Net Zero” and in particular to “delay or abandon key climate targets around vehicles and gas boilers”. In a video posted on social media, Packham boldly claimed that his case “could set a precedent that our leaders or their Governments cannot act on a whim without facing the legal consequences”.

Despite the crowdfunder text lacking key information that might enable potential donors to assess the merits of the judicial review claim and its prospects of success – such as the text of the ‘pre-action protocol’ letter that Packham seemingly sent to the Prime Minister and other ministers in early October, and the Government Legal Department’s (evidently dismissive) response – the crowdfunder raised more than £46,000 within 24 hours, and more than £60,000 within 48 hours.

While Packham’s crowdfunder did not initially mention any legal team, later on 4 December the law firm Leigh Day proudly posted on social media that three of their solicitors are representing him. And, prior to the launch of the crowdfunder, on 1 December the law firm had posted a news release setting out the grounds of Packham’s judicial review claim. Somewhat surprisingly, Packham’s crowdfunder did not link to this Leigh Day news release, but in any case the news release does not include any part of the Government Legal Department’s response, so does not allow a balanced assessment of the merits of Packham’s judicial review claim and its prospects of success. Leigh Day did not respond to my questions about whether they planned to publish the Government Legal Department’s response.

Furthermore, on the very same day that Packham launched his crowdfunder it emerged he has recently donated £50,000 to the campaign group Just Stop Oil. And in late 2023 Packham reportedly funded the £50,000 costs of setting up and broadcasting the YouTube series 8 Out of 10 Bats. Which tends to suggest that Packham could afford to cover the legal costs of litigation that he has actively chosen to initiate, but which is unlikely to reach court much before the coming General Election, widely expected to be held in May. So it is not clear why he thinks it appropriate to solicit money from well-meaning but manifestly uninformed members of the public, for a legal challenge that has little if any chance – even if ultimately successful – of changing the current Government’s policies on Net Zero.

Packham’s crowdfunder reached its initial £75,000 target on 7 December, when the target was promptly raised to £100,000. However, by 11 December the crowdfunder was closed, having raised a total of £84,945 from 3,132 donors (an average donation of just over £27).

[Update: On 4 March, Packham announced on social media that he has been granted permission to apply for Judicial Review. Packham’s solicitors, the law firm Leigh Day, also issued a news release.]

The GLP’s allegations against Palantir, Topham Guerin and others

Late on the evening of 21 December, a few minutes after receiving a GLP email with a video link to Jolyon Maugham’s End of Year message to supporters, I mockingly posted on social media that, during 2023, the GLP had blown a total of £623,895 of crowdfunded donations on nine legal defeats in court, while Jolyon Maugham had been forced to apologise to the Chair of the Environment Agency, had launched a one-man boycott of Gail’s bakeries, and had narrowly avoided imprisonment for contempt of court. And this post got rather more than the mere handful of ‘likes’ and reposts that even my most appreciated posts tend to attract (as of 3 January, it has just over 3,000 likes and 900 reposts).

A few hours later, early on 22 December, Jolyon Maugham posted on social media:

I know this sounds dramatic, but we hold copies of a ‘confidential’ plan run by the Tory attack agency Topham Guerin to pay influencers to attack the Good Law Project over the Christmas period … Lots of questions arise including how many of the bad faith attacks on our work are secretly paid for by Topham Guerin or other Tory attack agencies.

A few hours later still, I received yet another GLP email to supporters, headed “We’re under attack” and claiming that “a secret briefing document has revealed a campaign to attack Good Law Project on social media”. The email – and also a statement posted on the GLP’s website – went on to state that “the document bears the branding of the [public relations] firm Topham Guerin and directly targets Good Law Project, because of our concerns over the £330m deal between tech giant Palantir and the Government to process millions of NHS patient records”. And it melodramatically concluded:

This secret document discloses [Topham Guerin] is prepared to pay for covert hits on its clients’ enemies, and raises obvious questions about the motivation behind other attacks on Good Law Project [emphasis added].

With our wide body of work, including exposing the PPE scandal, we’re used to the dangers of punching upwards. We can and will withstand these attacks. But the forces behind them and the dark money that fuels them must be brought out into the light.

The message that ‘a PR firm that works for the Tories and Palantir has been offering to pay for attacks on the GLP’ was promptly amplified by GLP-supporting numpties such as Carol Vorderman (934K followers on X, formerly known as Twitter), Dawn Butler MP (243K followers on X), and Baroness (Natalie) Bennett (185K followers on X).

However, the GLP has not published the leaked ‘secret briefing document’, and has not produced any evidence of actual paid-for ‘attacks’ on the GLP over the Christmas period (or at any other time). Later on 22 December, Jolyon Maugham posted on social media a screenshot of a small, anodyne segment of what appeared to be a four-page Topham Guerin document, but that screenshot did not substantiate the serious allegations made by Jolyon Maugham and the GLP against Topham Guerin, and certainly did not validate Jolyon’s more sweeping claim that much of the criticism of the GLP on social media is “secretly paid for by Topham Guerin or other Tory attack agencies [sic]”.

Later still on 22 December, quite possibly after imbibing too much champagne, Jolyon posted on social media:

I know it’s very fashionable amongst certain, usually very privileged, commentators to sneer at Good Law Project.

Those people – Richard Dunstan, Barbara Rich and so on – sneer at us because, however they think of themselves, secretly they like things as they are. And they sneer at you too – they think you are misled in supporting us, that you don’t understand what we do, only they do.

Unsurprisingly, over the next few hours and days, on social media both Barbara Rich and I were repeatedly accosted by GLP supporters demanding to know how much Topham Guerin have paid us for our criticism of Jolyon Maugham and the GLP’s approach to crowdfunded litigation.

Yesterday, 2 January, the GLP posted a further statement on their website, revealing that the source of the leaked Topham Guerin document was Julia Patterson – the founder and CEO of Every Doctor, an ‘organisation’ allied with the GLP which shares the GLP’s habit of crowdfunding its campaigning – who was evidently approached on behalf of Topham Guerin by yet another public relations agency, Disrupt, at some unspecified point in December. This further GLP statement includes the small segment of the Topham Guerin document posted by Jolyon on 22 December, as well as another segment of the document headed ‘Requirements’.

While we can only guess why the GLP have not (yet) published the Topham Guerin document in full, the limited ‘evidence’ produced by the GLP to date simply does not validate the overwrought allegations made by Jolyon and the GLP against Topham Guerin and Palantir since 22 December.

As noted on this blog last month in Good Grift Watch update #4, in recent months Jolyon and the GLP have excitedly attacked the awarding of a contract to Palantir by the NHS, on the basis of little more than conspiracy theory, innuendo and guilt by association. Furthermore, on 23 November they incorrectly advised their supporters to use the online NHS national data opt-out to avoid “all of your personal medical information” being shared with “America’s scariest tech giant … co-founded by someone called Peter Thiel, who is a right-wing venture capitalist with very critical views of the NHS”. So it does not seem unusual, let alone unreasonable, for Palantir to engage PR agencies to seek to address such misinformation. As one lawyer who robustly defended Jolyon and the GLP on social media on 22 December said last night, in light of the latest ‘revelations’:

I’m embarrassed to say that I overestimated the integrity and, frankly, self-respect of Jolyon Maugham. The specific allegation was that Topham Guerin were paying people to smear/attack/discredit the GLP. That’s simply not what the [section of the Topham Guerin document headed ‘Requirements’] says. It’s not even ambiguous. I’m just staggered that anyone would risk their practising certificate over this nonsense.

As it happens, the GLP have form when it comes to playing fast and loose with la vérité. As previously noted on this blog, and as alluded to in my mocking post of 21 December, in April last year Jolyon was forced to apologise to the Chair of the Environment Agency after the GLP “over-egged” an allegation about a potential conflict of interest. 

Whatever, this latest GLP statement does absolutely nothing to justify or substantiate Jolyon’s hysterical if not neurotic and defamatory claim that much of the criticism on social media of the GLP’s approach to crowdfunded litigation – and in particular that posted by me and Barbara Rich – is “secretly paid for by Topham Guerin or other Tory attack agencies”.

Jolyon Maugham’s implicit threat of legal action against Dr Michael Foran

On 24 December, Jolyon Maugham appeared to threaten legal action against a Glasgow University academic, Michael Foran, after Dr Foran criticised the GLP’s approach to crowdfunded litigation on social media. Responding to Jolyon having posted on social media on 22 December that “winning and losing is a silly metric, we could win all our cases if we chose only to pursue easy ones”, on 24 December Dr Foran posted:

Maugham has [posted] that some/many of the cases the GLP take are unlikely to succeed but that there are good reasons to pursue them anyway. That’s perfectly fine, if you’re saying as [much] when crowdfunding. Does the GLP make that clear?

As documented in previous posts about the GLP on this blog since early 2022, and in a social media thread that I posted on 26 December, the answer to that question is a very definite ‘No’. Since being founded by Jolyon in March 2017, the GLP has launched 64 crowdfunders, which between them have raked in £5.236 million. Yet in only four (6%) of those 64 cases has the associated litigation resulted in a significant legal win in court for the GLP (see my updated Table of Failure & Futility, below). And very few if any of the 64 crowdfunder texts included more than a cursory and/or cryptic assessment of the legal claim’s prospects of success.

Almost as if to prove this point, on 25 December Dr Matt Kneale, co-chair of the Doctors’ Association, who has launched a judicial review – funded by a GLP crowdfunder launched on 2 June 2023 – against the General Medical Council, posted on social media that the prospects of success of his legal claim are “not great”, and that he had been aware of this from the outset. However, despite Dr Kneale being bound by a Code of Practice that requires him to “be honest and open and act with integrity”, there is simply nothing in the GLP crowdfunder text that might warn potential donors of this pertinent fact, and to date the crowdfunder has raked in £22,113. (Today, on X formerly known as Twitter, Dr Kneale first blocked both me and Barbara Rich, then locked his account.)

In the absence of any response from the GLP, Dr Foran further posted on social media:

If you’re engaged in strategic litigation you know some of your cases have a low prospect of success. The issue is that Maugham is soliciting crowdfunding. He’s presenting every case as a winner and isn’t warning those donating when the prospects are low.

Jolyon replied directly to this post, stating: “What is your evidential basis, Michael, for saying I present every case as a winner? You see, yours seems to be quite a serious allegations [sic]: that I am deliberately misleading the public.”

To which Dr Foran replied: “I’m not claiming that you’re deliberately misleading the public. I’m saying that you could do more to make it clear when a case you’re bringing has a low prospect of success, beyond saying that the case is not straightforward.”

Jolyon did not respond directly to that post, but instead posted separately on social media:

This is quite a serious allegation – that I deliberately mislead people as to our prospects of success – from a prominent academic and I have [asked Dr Foran] for his evidence for it. Here are the facts as I see them: (1) we always take advice from specialist leading counsel before litigating and we never litigate if we are told the prospects are poor [and] (2) we always publish our [Pre-Action Protocol] letter when we crowdfund.

So I look forward to hearing from [Michael Foran] as to his evidential basis for that very serious allegation about me. He should withdraw it – it is entirely false – and apologise.

Then, in response to a GLP supporter posting “take [Michael Foran] to court and try and put an end to the false allegations and mistruths,” Jolyon posted: “I hope he does the right thing. There is too much of this from people who should know better.”

Quite rightly, Dr Foran did not apologise. As one lawyer posted in direct reply to Jolyon on 26 December, “[Michael Foran’s post] is not an allegation that you “deliberately mislead” people, Jolyon. That’s a fraud allegation. The [post] as I read it was saying you’re overly optimistic. That’s a suggestion you are honest but mistaken, and I don’t see how the [post] is actionable”.

Finally, Jolyon posted to Dr Foran:

I’ve asked you politely to do the right thing. You’ve declined. I think I’ve exhausted what I can do by way of polite engagement.

Whatever, as of 3 January, Dr Foran has not heard further from Jolyon, or from Jolyon’s lawyers. And Jolyon has yet to explain why, if he and the GLP are deliberately choosing to pursue legal claims that they know may well not succeed in court (because they are not “easy”), this is rarely if ever flagged – let alone spelled out in terms that a non-legally trained potential donor can readily understand – in the GLP’s crowdfunder texts. But his Big Christmas Meltdown has ensured that each new GLP crowdfunder will now be measured against the standards which Jolyon has so loudly and piously proclaimed.

The GLP’s vanishing PPE maker crowdfunder

Early on or shortly before 26 December, the GLP posted online a clearly incomplete new crowdfunder in support of a private prosecution of an unidentified PPE maker. Despite there being no text about the case, and despite there having been no donations, the crowdfunder stated: “Most donors donate £29 or more”. And, upon closer inspection, it was clear to me that the crowdfunder was open to donations.

So I made a donation. And the £6.66 was promptly taken from my bank account.

The following day, 27 December, on social media I asked Stewart Wood, a GLP board member, why the GLP was happy to accept my donation to a crowdfunder that didn’t even say what the case was about. Wood did not reply, but several hours later the crowdfunder page was deleted. However, as of 3 January, my £6.66 donation has not been refunded.

[Update: On 8 January, the £6.66 arrived back home in my bank account, having been refunded by the GLP on 6 January, along with the £1 that I donated to their supposedly closed Drink Spiking crowdfunder on 5 January.]

The GLP’s crowdfunded income in December

The GLP’s total income from crowdfunders in December was £3,821, plus my £6.66 donation to the now deleted PPE maker crowdfunder (see above).

Leaving aside the quickly deleted PPE maker crowdfunder, it is now almost four months since the GLP last launched a new crowdfunder – the highly remunerative Misuse of Public Money crowdfunder launched on 8 September. As a result, crowdfunded income over the last three months was down 90% on the previous three months, and down 85% on the same period in 2022.

Upcoming events

Judgment is awaited in the GLP’s Manchester Ship Canal case, which was heard by the Supreme Court in early March last year (and for which there was no crowdfunder).

Updated Table of Failure and Futility (TOFF)

This table shows the sum raised by and outcome to date of the 64 crowdfunders launched by the GLP since March 2017. (Dark orange = court defeat; light orange = other negative/unproductive outcome; dark green = court win; light green = other positive/productive outcome; grey = in progress/other)