Bringing Down Goliath: How Good Law Can Topple the Powerful

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Imagine yourself, if you will, Mark Francois. A working-class lad – born to a mother who comes from Italy to work as an au pair and a dad who becomes a heating engineer after being demobilised from a stoker on a coal-fired minesweeper. At 14 your father dies suddenly and your mother becomes clinically depressed. Besides studying for your O and A-levels you become her carer – in between her visits to psychiatric wards. When this was revealed, and because of possible accusations of bias, it meant the UNPRECEDENTED setting aside of the House of Lords judgement, because in the words of another Law Lord, Lord Hutton:” public confidence in the integrity of the administration of Justice would be shaken if his Hoffman’s) decision was allowed to stand”. For much of this year he has been dismayed at the reluctance of large parts of the media to share his litigious anger about government secrecy. In recent weeks, he has sensed that opinion shifting. Even the Daily Mail, which led the hounding of “the fox-killing barrister”, has started giving in-depth coverage to the Good Law Project’s procurement findings, suggesting a change of editorial heart as to who or what might actually represent “the enemy of the people”. And still, from a comprehensive school intake of 226, you are one of two to make it to university. You beat off competition from Boris Johnson to win the party nomination for a safe seat which you hold and then strengthen over successive Parliaments. You become a member of the European Research Group (ERG) and argue for – and from a narrow referendum mandate help extract – a hard break from the United Kingdom’s near 50-year membership of the European Union. And for a time you’re mooted as a possible future leader of the Conservative Party.

Mr Maugham claimed that the bad review of Bringing Down Goliath, which explores a series of high-profile cases brought against the Government by his governance watchdog the Good Law Project, was because of where The Times “stands in relation to my politics”. I don’t think they have, which from my perspective is rather a pity because I think they would have got short shrift from my regulator. It would be a little awkward for the government legal department to refer me to my regulator and then for my regulator to clear me. It would look very obviously like what it felt like at the time, namely an attempt to bring the power of the state to bear on the silencing of a very vocal critic.” Maugham believes, without evidence, that Cummings was instrumental in briefing against him and his work to the BBC. Certainly it is striking that, over the past four years of wall-to-wall Brexit talking heads, there appears to have been an unexplained ban on invitations to Maugham, though he has been a pivotal figure in many of its debates. Only the second occasion on which he has ever been interviewed by the Today programme came earlier this year after what his office has learned to call TIWTF: the incident with the fox. Such shifts will not have gone unnoticed in government. Last week Maugham revealed the results of more freedom of information requests, which exposed a desperate behind-the-scenes paper trail, involving the army and the Department of Health, to assemble some vestige of a defence for another PestFix contract. He is confident that by the time of the hearing next February, many more such cases will have surfaced. Here's something I'm rather conscious of. Accusing someone of being smug, or sensitive, or vain is a very easy thing to do. Those types of insults are very difficult to disprove because any effort to disprove it will own further your association with that characteristic. So when I use it to describe Jolyon Maugham KC's book, I mean for it to be a challengeable position, which ought to be playing out in the readers mind.

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A protester outside the Court of Session in Edinburgh, where Maugham argued in October 2019 that Boris Johnson should seek an extension of article 50. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA Media The lawyers’ letter was a response to documents leaked to Maugham, which were shared with the press. Having held himself out as someone delivering transparency and accountability, Maugham says: “Behaving consistently with what I set out to do actually is upholding the standards of a courageous, independent bar.” By law, the government must publish a summary of any publicly awarded contracts within a certain timeframe.

The latter cases form part of the material behind this week’s explosive National Audit Office Report, which revealed how suppliers with favourable political connections have been directed to a “high priority channel” for government contracts, giving them ten times more chance of success. The report appears to vindicate what has been a stubborn gathering of evidence by Maugham and others over many months. Hoffman sat as a Law Lord in the extradition case of Augusto Pinochet.That case had been brought to the House of Lords by Amnesty International (AI) and others.

First night reviews

He's also not wrong in many of his arguments. It's true that access to the law and legal aid is unequal and unfair. He's right to criticise the law on deprivation of nationality, which seems to me fundamentally unjust and illiberal. He’s correct to bemoan the government’s readiness to use its bottomless bank account to take bad cases repeatedly to court, especially HMRC in its obsessional pursuit of tax collectors’ rights. And I agree with him that the judiciary must be open to public criticism, though he seems happier when it's at his hands than at the Daily Mail's.