So, having launched only three new crowdfunders in the first seven months of the Starmer era, and then starting their 2025-26 reporting year on 1 February with just two open crowdfunders, Jolyon Maugham KC and his (Not Very) Good Law Project have since gone a bit crazeee, launching two new crowdfunders in February, and another three in March.

It was always going to be fun to see how the thin-skinned Jolyon would re-invent himself, following the demise on 4 July of the Tory cash cow that he and the GLP had milked so effectively for seven years, and – just one week later – Jolyon’s puerile wrecking of any chance he and the GLP might have had of cosying up to the new Labour Government. And one new identity that Jolyon appears to enjoy cosplaying is: Detective Chief Inspector Maugham of the Morality Police.

Three of the five new crowdfunders are in support of separate legal actions against a journalist, an academic and an employment judge accused of sexual or other misconduct in the workplace. And it seems there are more such cases to come: earlier today, DCI Maugham boasted on Bluesky that the GLP has “a growing portfolio of public interest employment law cases involving high profile defendants implicated in sexual assault, racism and genocide denial”. Nee-naw! Nee-naw!

In his Christmas Eve email to GLP supporters, Jolyon pompously asserted: “We are about holding power to account. We don’t care whether that power is red or blue, and we are already holding Labour to account, just like we did with the Tories.” But not one of the GLP’s seven open crowdfunders is about holding ‘red power’ to account. Indeed, one targets Nigel Farage and his Reform Party, another targets the Daily Mail, and one targets the ‘bigotry and hate” of … Donald Trump. And this compulsion to attack what Jolyon and the GLP call “the far right” also dominates their social media posts.

As I noted on this blog in November, “old habits die hard and, when you’ve spent over seven years deep in your comfort zone, it must be quite hard to step outside it”. Whatever, the GLP’s crowdfunding in the new era of ‘red power’ looks a lot like the GLP’s industrial-scale crowdfunding under ‘blue power’.

The five crowdfunders launched since 1 February

Launched on 6 February with a modest target of £10,000, the LSE crowdfunder is in support of “funding counsel to draw up an internal complaint to the vice president” of the London School of Economics, about the LSE’s previous investigation of complaints of sexual misconduct against an unnamed but “high profile” senior professor, as well as “hiring an investigative journalist to look into the complaints”. The crowdfunder states that the GLP expect to “publish full details, including the name of the professor”; it currently stands at £8,304 from 474 midwits.

Launched on 18 February with a target of £40,000, the Daily Mail crowdfunder is in support of Employment Tribunal claims for disability discrimination, whistleblowing and victimisation against both the Daily Mail and “a star journalist”, on behalf of X, a young employee of the newspaper’s publisher. The crowdfunder alleges that X was “groped by the journalist, whom we are naming only as J”, and states that the GLP “plan to publish [X’s] ‘Grounds of Claim’ and the names of X and J just as soon as we can. But meanwhile we need your help – taking on the might of the Mail is going to be very expensive.” On 26 February, with the crowdfunder flatlining at just over £19,000, the GLP posted a brief ‘news update’ on their website, headlined “Daily Mail threatens to sue Good Law Project”, and over the next 48 hours a second wave of some 800 donations took the total to more than £32,000. The crowdfunder currently stands at £34,214 from 2,049 midwits.

Launched on 6 March with a target of £30,000, the Shein crowdfunder is in support of a potential legal challenge by the campaign group Stop Uyghur Genocide against the Financial Conduct Authority, should the junk fashion retailer Shein succeed in its bid to raise finance by floating on the London Stock Exchange. The crowdfunder currently stands at £4,088 from 251 midwits.

Launched on 11 March with a target of £13,200, the Employment Judge Lancaster crowdfunder is in support of a potential (and not yet specified) legal challenge to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office’s previous investigation of multiple complaints against Employment Judge Philip Lancaster, should legal advice from “a stellar team of women lawyers” prove “positive”. It currently stands at £4,827 from 185 midwits.

Launched on 20 March with a target of £30,000, the Morrison Foerster crowdfunder is headlined “Stop Trump exporting bigotry and hate” and is in support of threatened legal action in the High Court against the London office of the major US law firm Morrison Foerster, on behalf of an unidentified woman who identifies as a (trans)man, referred to as ‘RJW’ in the GLP’s letter before claim of 19 March. The GLP allege that Morrison Foerster discriminated against RJW by initially agreeing to act for them, but later declining to do so “because, we believe, [the law firm] feared the consequences of acting in a case about protecting trans people”. Yet, as one lawyer told the Roll on Friday website, “there may have been other reasons why [Morrison Foerster] decided not to take [the case] on”, so donors are “being asked to contribute based on nothing more than a vague allegation”. The crowdfunder currently stands at £15,153 from 852 midwits.

Rage, rage against the dying of The Grift

However, there is one key difference: the crowdfunding is nowhere near as remunerative at it was under the Tories. Indeed, the grift-fest in February and March simply underlines a rather fundamental problem for Jolyon and the some 40 staffers of the GLP, namely that such crowdfunding is not really working for them anymore. As the following chart shows, substituting Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Elon Musk for Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings in their crowdfunder texts, associated social media posts and begging emails to supporters has not (yet) halted – let alone reversed – a marked and steady decline, since the glory days of 2020/21, in the average sum raised by GLP crowdfunders.

In noting this trend, it is only fair to acknowledge that, since 2019/20, crowdfunding has provided an ever diminishing proportion of the GLP’s total annual income, with most revenue coming from midwits daft enough to make a regular, direct donation. But Jolyon and the GLP’s heavy and persistent promotion of their crowdfunders on social media and in begging emails to supporters would suggest they regard such grifting as an important way of signalling their virility to existing and potential supporters, in order to keep those direct donations coming.

In recent months, the GLP have lost their legal director but acquired a managing director (to work alongside executive director Jolyon), and there does seem to be plenty of money in the bank for new staff posts (including an employment lawyer to manage the cases emerging from DCI Maugham’s late-night trawling of the darker corners of the Internet). But their crowdfunding, at least, appears to have reached the point where it would qualify for Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide service.