[Note: This blog post, including the table, charts and GLP organogram below, is regularly updated; it was last updated on 30 November]

You ain’t nothin’ but a lost cause
And this ain’t nothin’ like it once was
I know you think you’re such an outlaw
But you got no job

Sure, I ain’t no Billie Eilish, but since 2022 I have produced and shared various iterations of my Table of Failure and Futility (ToFF), showing the sum raised by, and outcome of, the crowdfunders launched by former tax (avoidance) barrister Jolyon Maugham KC and his band of sunshine, the Good Law Project.

I have done so because I have long considered Maugham to be a toxic demagogue and a public menace. Having become wealthy – but bored – by helping other wealthy people pay less tax, he had wet dreams of using undemocratic lawfare to frustrate Brexit, and then to bring down the appalling but democratically-elected Johnson government that overrode those efforts. As Private Eye noted recently, he set up the GLP (in March 2017) to “take legal action against those he disapproves of”, and that has since included public bodies such as the Charity Commission, Ofcom and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, as well as charities advocating for LGB rights and women’s rights.

On social media and through his lawfare, the sanctimonious Maugham sows hate, fear and division, and undermines public trust in the legal and political systems. Effectively unregulated, utterly convinced of his own moral rectitude, and accountable to no one, he is a semen stain on the reputation of the legal profession, an industrial-scale grifter, and a conman, extracting vast sums from the fearful and the ill-informed to spend on his personal and ideological hobby-horses as he – and only he – sees fit.

Furthermore, since early 2024, his principal hobby-horses have been promoting the aggressively misogynistic and homophobic ideology of transgenderism, and – using money grifted from the ever fearful but seemingly cash-rich ‘trans community’ – undermining the Supreme Court ruling of 16 April on the meaning of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010. Yet the hypocritical Maugham once said: “if the Supreme Court says it is the law, it is the law” and anyone who disagrees is just “moral detritus”.

Indeed, to my mind, Maugham’s idiosyncratic, scattergun lawfare is an offence to our parliamentary democracy, while the GLP’s exploitative crowdfunding is often almost indistinguishable from the criminal offence of obtaining money by deception. And £28.5 million is a lot of (other people’s) money.

Anyway, in the weeks following the Supreme Court ruling on 16 April, as the increasingly unhinged Maugham reprised last year’s very public meltdown over a court ruling on transgenderism that he, his wife and his two trans-identifying daughters don’t like, I saw various old – so out of date – versions of my ToFF flying around on social media. So I thought it might he useful to post it here, and then keep it updated.

Note that I have condensed the 16 crowdfunders of the Brexit era (March 2017 to March 2020) into one line (in blue), mainly to keep the ever-growing table manageable but also because Maugham’s failed attempt to frustrate Brexit with undemocratic lawfare is now ancient history.

It was of course his two big court wins on Brexit – the Wightman case in December 2018, about whether the Article 50 notification was revocable, and then the Prorogation of Parliament case in September 2019 – that made Maugham famous and led him to abandon his obscenely lucrative career in tax (avoidance) law, and become a full-time grifter. But of course, in the final analysis, those two famous court wins achieved nothing. Zilch. Nada. Rien. Because the UK still left the EU in January 2020.

As Josh Glancy noted memorably in The Times in April 2023, Maugham’s two big Brexit wins “were ultimately irrelevant, mostly methadone for Remainers”.

Were it not for the arrival of Covid19 a few months later, the story of the GLP might well have ended there – much like the life of the fox that Maugham battered with a baseball bat in his garden on Boxing Day 2019. But, thanks to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock, between April 2020 and January 2022 the GLP raised an incredible £2.5 million from 18 Covid19-related crowdfunders.

However, while five of the crowdfunders raised more than £200,000, and two more than £400,000, not one of the 18 legal challenges resulted in a clear legal win, and only two had any kind of positive outcome for the GLP. In February 2021, their ‘Transparency’ case concluded with the High Court issuing a near-meaningless ‘declaration’ that the Government had not fully complied with transparency rules on the publishing of contracts. And in January 2022, their ‘VIP Lane’ case concluded with the High Court ruling that the operation of the High Priority Lane for the awarding of PPE contracts was “in breach of the obligation of equal treatment”. However, having concluded that all the contracts in question were “highly likely” to have been awarded in any event, the Court refused to grant a declaration (sought by the GLP) that the High Priority Lane was unlawful per se, and ordered the GLP to pay £250,000 of the Government’s legal costs. So, nothing much was achieved with that £2.5 million.

And it is on that basis – the longer-term impact on public policy, rather than the narrow legal outcome – that I have placed the outcome of the crowdfunders into one of four bands. As Maugham himself once said, when it comes to gauging the outcome of public law cases, “winning and losing is a silly metric”. What really matters is whether the legal outcome changes public policy to any significant degree.

So, in my ToFF, dark green = clear legal and/or policy win for the GLP; light green = other positive/productive outcome; dark orange = clear legal defeat for the GLP; light orange = other negative/unproductive outcome; and grey = still in progress/other.

This is, of course, a subjective analysis, and no doubt Maugham and/or others would take issue with some of my assessments of outcome. Since first producing my ToFF in 2022, I have always been willing – and, indeed, have repeatedly offered – to engage in dialogue with Maugham, and to carefully consider any information that I may have missed or misunderstood that might alter my assessments. But Maugham blocked me on social media years ago, and – apart from once suggesting to his supporters that I am a paid Tory troll, and more recently that I am “a man with a very weird agenda” – has never seen fit to acknowledge my analysis, let alone engage with me.

Whatever, it is now more than two years since Maugham and the GLP last launched a crowdfunder in support of a legal case that later concluded with them being able to celebrate a clear legal or policy win (i.e. dark green in my ToFF). In May 2024, the judicial review claim in their Net Zero 2 case, launched jointly with Friends of the Earth and ClientEarth on 7 July 2023, was allowed by the High Court. And, of the 61 crowdfunders launched by the GLP since 1 January 2021, that Net Zero 2 crowdfunder is one of only five to result in some kind of positive outcome for the GLP.

If you want to talk ‘win ratio’, that’s 8%. But if you want to talk impact, it’s ‘virtually none’.

In July 2022, their original Net Zero case was allowed by the High Court. But that ‘legal win’ proved to be such a damp squib they had to launch their Net Zero 2 case in July 2023. Then, in March 2023, they got a Shrewsbury Town Council planning decision overturned in the Supreme Court. In April 2023, thanks to a mysterious series of very large donations from an anonymous donor (or donors), they helped fund the successful defamation defence of Nina Cresswell by the law firm Bindmans. And, last month, they settled their rather silly legal claim against the US law form Morrison Foerster on behalf of an unidentified transman (who, for reasons unknown, received only 20% of the £25,000 damages paid by Morrison Foerster, with the remainder going to the GLP).

So, over the last five years, the GLP has achieved two now irrelevant court wins on Net Zero, has overturned a Shrewsbury Town Council planning decision, has helped fund one of law firm Bindmans’ cases, and has pointlessly wrung £25,000 out of a wealthy US law firm. And all that for just £3.156 million of crowdfunded donations, plus more than £20 million of direct/regular donations and grants, since 1 January 2021.

No wonder then, that in June this year Maugham confessed that, after the end of the Covid pandemic in 2021, he and the GLP spent four years “blundering around trying to find the next thing that we should focus on”. And, over those four years, income from crowdfunders plummeted, from some £450,000 per quarter in late 2021, to some £200,000 per quarter in late 2022, to some £35,000 per quarter in late 2024, to just £5,803 in September 2025, and £5,206 in October. But with the Supreme Court ruling in favour of For Women Scotland on 16 April, Maugham and the GLP found – or, more accurately, rediscovered – their ‘next new thing’: transgender woo woo. And, since then, they have aggressively mined a rich seam of seemingly surplus cash in the ever fearful ‘trans community’ – though, as can be seen from the following chart, this financial boom has now come to an end.

Whether this crowdfunded largesse will lead to an increase in the GLP’s dire ‘win ratio’ remains to be seen – though, as documented elsewhere on this blog, the signs are not good (we await judgment in the bizarre case of GLP & Bridget Phillipson v EHRC). But their six most recent crowdfunders have not attracted anywhere near such generosity.

The crowdfunder in support of Albie Amankona’s employment tribunal claim against his former employer, GB News, launched on 23 June with a (modest) target of £20,000, has so far raised a mere £3,176 from 208 donations. Which is not much more than Amankona will have spent flying business class to India in October. There have been only two donations since mid-September.

Similarly, the crowdfunder in support of student activist Stella Maris’s legal claim against St Andrews University, launched on 31 July with a (modest) target of £15,000, has so far raised just £10,814 from 618 donations. There have been no donations since mid-October.

The characteristically uninformative crowdfunder in support of a nebulous legal challenge to the Government’s policy on what the GLP calls “global heating”, launched on 6 November with a target of £30,000, has so far raised just £7,201 from 318 donations. This is the GLP’s first major legal challenge to the Labour Government since last year’s general election, and the evident lack of interest suggests that the GLP’s incessant focus on transgenderism in 2025 may have driven away some of the ‘green’ supporters who donated a total of £110,842 to their 2022 and 2023 crowdfunders on Net Zero.

The similarly uninformative crowdfunder in support of an application to the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of Child D and her mother, launched on 18 November with a target of £20,000, has so far raised £9,383 from 596 donations. Jolyon and the GLP seem to think it obvious that “our judiciary has got this [case] very wrong”, so they have not included in the crowdfunder text any summary of or link to the High Court’s recent ruling in the case, which might have enabled potential donors to make an informed decision about whether or not to donate. And, at the time of writing, it is unclear how much of the £9,383 has come from Jolyon shaking his begging bowl at the “far-right” activist Tommy Robinson.

The crowdfunder in support of a personal injury claim against Northumbria Police on behalf of Nina Cresswell, launched on 25 November with a target of £20,000, raised only £927 in its first 48 hours. As noted above, this is Cresswell’s second gig with the GLP: in late 2022 and early 2023, thanks to a mysterious series of very large donations from an anonymous donor (or donors), the GLP’s crowdfunder helped fund law firm Bindmans’ successful defamation defence of Cresswell.

And the crowdfunder in support of a complaint to Ofcom about allegedly unlawful posts on X/Twitter, launched on 26 November with a target of £30,000, was also slow out of the blocks, raising just £750 in its first 24 hours, but then – with help from some Elon Musk-hating Tesla owners – picking up speed to reach £4,839 after 48 hours. It has since staggered on to £5,112.

To put the above figures in perspective, within 48 hours of their launch the 12 crowdfunders launched by the GLP in 2024 raised an average of £12,403, and four of them raised more than £20,000.

Fortunately for Jolyon and the 35-40 GLP staffers, while the wheels appear to have fallen off their crowdfunding model, a sufficient number of midwits continue to make monthly/regular donations to cover their annual wage bill of some £2.3 million (in 2024-25, according to their Financial Annual Report). Though quite what the well-paid staffers do all day, other than make unintentionally hilarious Tik Tok films of Jolyon manspreading on the office sofa, remains something of a mystery.

Anyway, I will keep this blog post, and the charts and organogram, updated.

Last updated: 30 November 2025