The Telegraph gives Joly a damn good thrashing.
If they ended up sitting next to each other at a dinner party, the recently retired barrister Barbara Rich suspects that she and Jolyon Maugham might actually get on.
…
Instead, Rich has become a sworn adversary of Maugham’s in the echo chamber of social media. Maugham, who founded the Good Law Project in 2017, is a divisive former tax silk [a senior barrister who holds the rank of KC] turned campaigning lawyer…
It’s not that he’s “divisive”; it’s that he’s a vain conceited condescending rude bully who is neck-deep in trans ideology and contemptuous toward women.
[Rich] and Maugham have sparred on X, formerly Twitter, since 2019. Last week, however, the hostilities were stepped up a notch by Maugham, who called Rich a “troll” in “polite white grandmother clothes”, an insult she said “appears to be a trifecta of ageism, sexism and racism”.
Also laughable coming from a rich white male tax lawyer old enough to be a grandfather.
This disagreement stemmed from a row over the Good Law Project’s most recent cause célèbre: a petition calling for an immediate public inquiry over the death of Jason Arday, the former University of Cambridge professor found dead earlier this month after he faced widespread allegations of plagiarism and fabricating aspects of his life story and professional achievements.
While Rich describes the case as “a very sad story” that “does need to be forensically explored – and will be at an inquest”, she took issue with the Good Law Project fundraising off the back of their Arday petition and felt Maugham’s language on the subject is “hyperbolic”.
On Wednesday last week, Maugham went one step further, launching a new campaign to “take the fight right to the throats” of the British press over Arday’s death, running a paid-for advertising campaign that will target readers of newspapers, including this one, encouraging them to cancel their subscriptions.
If only there were some way to cancel our subscriptions to Jolyon Maugham.
On X, Rich had criticised the project’s Arday petition as “high outrage, low effort activism, in both cases enabling the [Good Law Project] to add names and contact details to its database to promote its activities and solicit public donations for them”. Asked by the BBC about Rich’s post, Maugham shot back: “I think it is disgraceful for the BBC to take lies from social media about our fundraising off the back of Jason Arday.” He added, in no uncertain terms, that the Good Law Project had not fundraised in connection with Arday’s death.
This was not quite true. The Arday petition did in fact feature a prominent button soliciting general donations for the Good Law Project, which was quietly deleted following the interview. The BBC issued a correction, and Maugham later published a lengthy statement that included the acknowledgement that “Barbara Rich, a retired barrister with a long history of hostility towards Good Law Project, is right about this narrow point”.
Not quite an apology, then.
Zing.
Rich is based in London but is speaking to me over a video call from a flat she rented with her partner (who keeps away from the public sphere) to enjoy the Edinburgh Festival at the weekend. She is surprisingly even-handed in her comments about Maugham and aspects of the Good Law Project’s work but draws the line at his “polite white grandmother” comment, which she describes as “staggeringly ill-judged” – particularly for someone who spends his time campaigning against discrimination.
“The language he used is completely indefensible for somebody in his position, somebody who has chosen to make himself a spokesperson for minorities and outsiders,” she says. “It is what he’s chosen to do with his life. And obviously some people find that very admirable. But you can’t do that and then say, ‘well, we must advance the interests of all minorities and not be prejudiced… except against middle-aged white women’.”
Exactly so, and yet it’s so normal, so pervasive, so everyday. The great achievement of trans ideology has been to delete feminism from the consciousness of way too many people who consider themselves progressive.
She is by no means alone in this, but it seems Rich has the ability to really get under Maugham’s skin. They first “connected” on X (then Twitter) in 2019, when Rich responded to a tweet Maugham had posted (he is no longer active on the platform). “One day,” he wrote: “Guido Fawkes [the blogger] will admit that the reason I am very well paid is the same reason @GoodLawProject has enjoyed some spectacular successes: namely, I am very good at what I do.” Rich replied: “Modesty a bit less of a strong point, though…” Maugham did not take kindly to this.
“He absolutely went off the deep end – he said ‘oh, well, next time I want advice on social mores from a stranger on the internet, I’ll know who to ask,’” she says. “Pompous. That’s when I realised – or I felt – that this was not a very likeable personality, and not a very sensible one either.”
Pompous indeed. Nobody but a master of pomposity could look at his self-presentation and continue presenting himself that way.
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