Jolyon Maugham’s white-saviour complex – spiked

In a crowded field, Jolyon Maugham – the fox-bashing KC and founder of the Good Law Project – might have a claim to be the oddest man in British public life. As of 2015, he was a high-flying (by which I mean, rich) tax barrister. He lived in a windmill. He was like a kid’s cartoon character, who happened to advise rich people about their tax affairs. Postman VAT, if you will.

Then, around 2016, he turned his attention to politics and slagging off Brexit. He founded the Good Law Project (GLP) in 2017, which has since lent support to ‘progressive’ causes which are self-evidently ‘good’ – like forcing women to share toilets with biological men. Only bad people disagree with the work of the GLP after all.

He has faced ridicule for the sheer number of legal defeats suffered by the GLP. But it is Maugham himself who often attracts the most derision, most famously for his Boxing Day tweet in 2019, saying he had clubbed a fox to death that morning, while wearing his wife’s satin kimono. And now he’s doing something just as weird through his involvement in the Jason Arday story and especially his response to Arday’s death last Friday.

The GLP was involved in defending Arday as soon as the allegations of plagiarism against him first emerged several weeks ago, publishing an open letter accusing the ‘right-wing media’ of pursuing a ‘baseless’ racially motivated smear campaign. This in itself was a bit odd, given Arday already had lawyers, Carter-Ruck, who were reportedly fond of sending strong letters to anyone who questioned Arday’s dodgy credentials – as the Times Higher Education discovered last year, when it was forced to spike an investigation into Arday’s credentials following threat of legal action.

Now, Maugham has committed himself to exposing the journalists that apparently contributed to Arday’s death. This week, he published a piece on the GLP’s website, attacking the Guardian’s supposed role. Maugham claims that he circulated the open letter to journalists he assumed would be sympathetic. This included the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare, who happens to be mixed-race.

Bakare, rather than express unbridled support for the open letter, then sent a right-of-reply email to Arday, which implied Bakare was considering his own piece on the scandal. Arday then told Maugham that Bakare was ‘a journalist that I have not previously seen eye-to-eye with (we do not trust each other)’. In other words, Arday was claiming that Bakare was motivated by a personal animosity against him.

In response to a question from a member of the group working on the open letter, Maugham said: ‘So I don’t think there is a legal remedy, but you could write to [Guardian editor] Kath Viner making the point and asking whether it’s consistent with [the Guardian’s] ethics for someone with beef to write the piece.’

As a result of Maugham’s advice, an email was sent to Viner, asking her whether it was ‘appropriate’ for Bakare to write the piece – presumably on the grounds of the pair’s ‘beef’. Bakare’s Guardian piece was published anyway, under the title: ‘Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor.’ In Maugham’s eyes, Bakare had presumably committed a great betrayal by contributing to the scrutiny being placed on Arday.

Maugham’s piece goes on to criticise the Guardian in extremely strong terms. ‘Why were black and brown journalists at the Guardian asked to do the heavy lifting?’, he asks, which is an odd question. Why should the skin colour of a journalist matter at all? Was it wrong for black or brown journalists to cover the Arday story? Maugham then opined on what Bakare ‘now feels’ about the piece after Arday’s death, implying that Bakare ought to feel guilty about it.

He then posted an extremely odd video on X, in which he effectively called for the resignation of Viner. At the time, with no sense of irony, he called on his followers to stop the ‘abuse’ of other journalists ‘of colour’ at the Guardian, including Afua Hirsch, Nesrine Malik, Jason Okundaye and Joseph Harker, who had also written pieces that were not especially pro-Arday.

This bizarre sequence of events raises so many questions. Why was the GLP so unquestioningly certain in its support for Arday, to such an extent that it effectively helped him bat away awkward press enquiries? Why did Maugham think it appropriate to target black journalists, asking them to defend Arday before his death, and then shaming them for their refusal to do so after his death? And where on Earth did Maugham learn the meaning of the word ‘beef’?

What happened to Jason Arday was a complicated tragedy. But Maugham’s efforts to paint the journalistic scrutiny he received as racist hounding shows that he has been tied in knots by his own identitarian nonsense. He has used his position to target specific journalists, Bakare included, and then to hold them implicitly responsible for what has happened to Arday. Then, in the same rant, he paints himself as the white saviour of black journalists. ‘We need more black journalists’, he says in the video. But only, it seems, if their opinions have first been vetted by Maugham.

There is room in public life for lawyers who are political. Maugham should be allowed to express his views on whatever he likes. But his response to the Arday story shows him to be a tone-deaf, self-important bully. Neither Bakare, nor any other journalist who wrote about Arday, should ever be held responsible for his death.

This was an important story about a fabulist and alleged plagiarist who rose to the peak of academia, despite seemingly lacking any real academic ability. Lanre Bakare and others were right to write about it.

Let’s hope Maugham’s unhinged rant opens a few more eyes to what he really is – a nasty, self-righteous fool.

Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. He is the author of Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.