Next week, when MPs return to Westminster to begin work on the ambitious legislative programme set out in the King’s Speech on 17 July, the new Labour Government will be well into the second half of its first 100 days in office. And last week, as the half-way point of that 100 days was passed, Jolyon Maugham’s bestie Carol Vorderman gave Keir Starmer only “five to six” marks out of 10. Yet we still await the (Not Very) Good Law Project’s first new crowdfunded legal challenge of the Starmer era.

Under the Sunak-led Tories, the GLP launched new crowdfunders at a rate of more than one a month: 21 of them in the 18 months from 1 January 2023 to the General Election on 4 July, contributing to an overall total of 73 since 2017. In July and August last year the GLP launched four new crowdfunded legal challenges. But since Keir Starmer entered Downing Street two months ago, this industrial scale grifting has ground to a halt.

In fact, since 4 July, the GLP have closed four crowdfunders (all launched in 2024), and as a result they currently have only three open crowdfunders, all of them moribund. In August last year the GLP grifted thousands of donations totalling £82,744 via 11 different crowdfunders. So far this month, they’ve raked in just five donations totalling a mere £45, including two simultaneous £1 donations that were most likely made by a criminal testing out stolen credit/debit cards.

Jolyon’s cunning plan: how it started

This hiatus in the GLP’s use of the law to create a better, fairer and greener future for the UK was, at least initially, a tad surprising, given that they claim to have been “thinking hard about our work under a new government” and “making fresh plans for this moment of change”. In a blog posted the morning after the General Election, and emailed to the more than 300,000 people on the GLP’s mailing list, Jolyon shared his insight that:

Labour will be better than the Tories were – but we need a higher bar than that. We will campaign to improve standards in public life. And we will support the Covid Corruption Commissioner, making sure they benefit from our enormous database of evidence.

After an election which shamefully sidelined the climate crisis, we will keep fighting for a fairer, greener future and put reaching net zero front and centre. And we’ll carry on fighting the cases that no-one else will. We’re proud of our record on trans rights, and will expand our work defending women from violence and coercion.

But we’ve also been making fresh plans for this moment of change. It’s clear this morning that the far right is on the rise. The lies they tell are already in our sights.

Labour’s investment plans depend on securing significant support from private companies – but will they put our interests before their shareholders? We’ll be watching out for corporate abuse.

And it’s time to talk honestly about the harm Brexit is causing – and what it will take to make it right. This is what the country needs and we plan to ensure it is what Labour does.

Jolyon’s cunning plan: how it’s going

Unfortunately for Jolyon and the GLP, things didn’t get off to a great start when, just one week later, it emerged in the High Court that new health secretary Wes Streeting would not only contest the GLP’s legal challenge, launched in June, to the outgoing Tory government’s temporary ban on the prescribing of puberty blockers to under 18s by private sector providers, but plans to make the ban permanent.

This caused the evidently blindsided Jolyon to embark on an unhinged, 10-day, multi-post tirade on X/Twitter against both Wes Streeting and, later, the Government’s adviser on suicide prevention, Professor Louis Appleby, who on 19 July published a report comprehensively debunking Jolyon’s un-evidenced claims about suicides of trans-identifying young people. And on 29 July the GLP’s already desperately poor ‘record on trans rights’ deteriorated further when the High Court robustly dismissed their legal challenge to the puberty blockers ban.

By that time, Jolyon had announced (on 21 July) that he was “off walking in the mountains for a fortnight and am deleting twitter ’til I get back”. As I write, this two-week break from X/Twitter is still ongoing, and is now in its sixth week.

Since 4 July, new Chancellor Rachel Reeves has re-iterated Labour’s manifesto pledge to appoint a Covid Corruption Commissioner, and indeed on 22 July – the day after Jolyon began his ‘fortnight’ off X/Twitter – she told MPs she has begun the recruitment process. However, it remains wholly unclear what such an appointment would add to the existing organisations and structures, how much of the “billions lost to waste and fraud” is actually recoverable, or why the GLP have not already shared their “enormous database of evidence” with relevant crime agencies.

On 11 August, the GLP did have a gentle pop at Reform MP Richard Tice’s financial arrangements, with Jolyon quoted as saying: “If you really love your country you pay your taxes. You want young people to be well educated and older people to be cared for. You want a decent police force and your armed forces veterans looked after.” Though it’s yet to be confirmed whether Jolyon ever said this to his clients while making his own fortune as their tax (avoidance) lawyer. And a few days later Jolyon helpfully provided the Guardian with a similarly snide comment about Nigel Farage’s earnings.

However, I find it hard to see the GLP continuing to grift enough to cover their £2 million annual wage bill – there are some 40 GLP staffers – just by ‘supporting’ the Covid Corruption Commissioner, keeping an eye out for corporate abuse of Labour’s investment plans, hurling schoolboy snark at Reform MPs, and ‘talking honestly’ about Brexit.

The GLP Board’s cunning plan

More to the point, last week it emerged that the GLP Board – from which Labour peer Stewart Wood resigned on 31 July – feel much the same way. Because they are currently seeking to recruit an Interim Managing Director with a “demonstrable track record of successful design and delivery of change [sic]”, to:

• Facilitate the development of a refreshed legal and political strategy [for the GLP]
• Assess and re-conceptualise how the [GLP] works
• Develop the [GLP] and its culture to support the above and to design, plan and implement required changes

Noting, somewhat bizarrely, that the GLP is “not constrained in its activity as a regulated
charity would be”, the CharityJob recruitment notice (which has not been posted in the ‘vacancies‘ section of the GLP’s website) states:

Following the change of government, we are now working to shape the future of GLP. This pivotal moment presents an exciting opportunity for an experienced and creative leader to join us. The chosen candidate will have the unique chance to design and lead change, enabling the organisation to deliver its objectives while working alongside the founding Executive Director. The role is interim for six to nine months in the first instance.

Quite what that founding executive director, Jolyon Maugham, will be doing during this six to nine months of re-conceptualisation and implementation of “required changes” is entirely unclear, but that “in the first instance” sounds a bit ominous to me. And, as barrister and fellow long-time GLP-watcher Barbara Rich notes:

The need for a “refreshed political strategy” rather underscores the view that the GLP’s previous strategy was animated by opposition to the particular government then in power as much as by the more abstract desideratum of ‘using the law for a better world’.

Indeed, as noted previously on this blog, it was Boris Johnson who first made the GLP with his maverick handling of Brexit, and in particular his unlawful prorogation of Parliament in late 2019. And it was Boris Johnson who then saved the GLP with his reckless mishandling of Covid. As bad as it was for taxpayers, the “carnival of waste during the pandemic” identified by Rachel Reeves was effectively a small business grant to the GLP, which between early 2020 and early 2022 raised a stonking £2.5 million from 18 separate Covid-related crowdfunders, and another £6 million or so in direct donations. In January 2020, the GLP had 1,918 regular donors; by January 2022, they had 28,500.

As Jolyon himself said in November 2017:

The Good Law Project was my response to a perception that, with a Parliamentary opposition that was unable to put the Government under real pressure and a weakened fourth estate, there was an opportunity to look more to the courts to provide checks and balances to executive power. 

But by the end of 2022, with both Johnson and the useless Jeremy Corbyn gone, and the courts having repeatedly ruled that the GLP lacks standing to bring legal challenges to most government policy, the GLP’s business model of crowdfunded litigation intended to ‘hold executive power to account’ was in tatters, and total income was down 24% on the year before. In January 2023, I suggested on this blog that “the GLP is a busted flush, and it’s all downhill from now on”.

However, I also noted that, with some £4 million of donated cash in the bank, and ongoing regular donations from some 30,000 #FBPE and #GTTO midwits, Jolyon could continue to pointlessly pursue his many grievances against the “vast swathes of civil society comprised of Potemkin regulatory infrastructure” – and in particular the Charity Commission – for some time to come. The crash was coming, but it was too early to call the emergency services.

Things have been falling apart for some time

Has that time now come? Well, the metrics are certainly not good. As the following two charts show, both the average number of donors to the GLP’s crowdfunders and the average sum raised by those crowdfunders – already in steep decline since the glory days of 2020-21 – have slumped this year.

As a result, total income from crowdfunders over the past 11 months is down 57% on the same period one year earlier. And that figure will almost certainly worsen when next month is added to the mix, as in September last year the GLP grifted an exceptional £186,316 – more than four times the monthly average across the rest of the GLP’s reporting year February 2023 to January 2024 (£40,602).

This catastrophic slump in the GLP’s crowdfunded income may or may not be linked to two factors: the failure or futility of every one of the 13 crowdfunded legal challenges/campaign actions launched since July last year; and, this year, a greatly increased and wholly disproportionate focus – seemingly driven by Jolyon’s own (family) agenda – on the cult issue of transgenderism.

As can be seen from my updated Table of Failure & Futility (ToFF), below, the 13 crowdfunded legal challenges/campaign actions launched since the (ultimately successful) Net Zero 2 crowdfunder in July 2023 – only two of which are still ongoing – have collectively grifted £443,078 but achieved … absolutely nothing. And, of the eight crowdfunded legal challenges/campaign actions launched since 1 February (i.e. since the start of the GLP’s current reporting year 2024/25), four have been about transgenderism.

On the one hand, as previously documented on this blog, the GLP’s crowdfunders on transgenderism do receive a markedly higher average donation than those on other issues. And, as can be seen in the following chart, the Puberty blockers ban crowdfunder launched in June did raise £60,329 – more than twice the largest sum raised by any of the other seven crowdfunders launched since 1 February, and more than three times the average sum raised by those seven crowdfunders (£18,511).

On the other hand, not only did that legal challenge result in a crushing court defeat for the GLP, and a stinging rebuke by the Government’s adviser on suicide prevention, but Jolyon’s associated antics on social media have torpedoed the GLP’s relations with the new government minister community. As Jolyon might say, this isn’t conclusive evidence of legal and political genius.

Furthermore, those antics are just the latest (albeit most psychotic) episode in a pattern of erratic and unprofessional behaviour by Jolyon. Just in the last nine months, Jolyon has been spoken to by the police and required to apologise to the judge for a tweet he posted during the Brianna Ghey murder trial; has falsely implied that Barbara Rich and I have been paid by “Tory attack agencies” to criticise Jolyon and the GLP; has unjustly threatened a Glasgow University legal academic with libel action, simply for criticising the GLP’s approach to crowdfunded litigation; has accused the Lord Chief Justice of packing the court with Tory-leaning judges in a GLP case; and, in relation to that accusation, has got himself into an unseemly squabble on X/Twitter with the House of Commons Library’s expert on constitutional law.

Whatever, Keir Starmer is not Boris Johnson. Rachel Reeves is not Kwasi Kwarteng. Wes Streeting is not Matt Hancock. And Sue Gray is not Dominic Cummings.

So I can’t say I’m totally surprised that the GLP Board have concluded, albeit somewhat belatedly, that the GLP needs to find a new purpose. And that Jolyon is not the right person to find it for them.

No, I won’t be shedding any tears.

Update: On 30 August, the CharityJob recruitment of an Interim Managing Director for the GLP – originally due to continue until 11 September – was closed, without explanation. A few hours later, the GLP emailed a survey to those on their mailing list, seeking views on the Labour government and “how we should continue our work”. Somewhat oddly, given the GLP’s recent focus on transgenderism, a question asking “Which of these issues are you most interested in?” did not include any options linked to transgenderism, but early the next day the GLP tweeted their support for the trans activists protesting outside the Department for Education.

Further update: On 15 October, it emerged that Ben Whur has been hired as Interim Managing Director. Whur was previously the Interim Managing Director of Stonewall. As Whur begins his “re-conceptualisation” of how the GLP works, the organisation has 34 staffers plus 4 vacant posts:

Table of Failure & Futility

As my ToFF has been getting very long, for this latest update I have condensed the GLP’s first 16 crowdfunders – the Brexit Era, from March 2017 to March 2020 – into one line. There is an earlier version, showing those 16 Brexit Era crowdfunders in full, here.

Dark green = clear court win for the GLP; light green = other positive/productive outcome; dark orange = clear court defeat for the GLP; light orange = other negative/unproductive outcome; and grey = still in progress/other.