“Have you heard of Jolyon Maugham?”
This was the unexpected question in an unexpected phone call I received just after Christmas in 2019 from an old friend. Sadly, I had.
The friend was a legal colleague of Maugham’s and he and his fellow colleagues were getting increasingly concerned about Jolyon’s penchant for provocative outbursts on social media particularly on X or as it was then, Twitter. Brexit had lit a fire under his bonnet.
This was the day after boxing day when Maugham had inadvertently broken the internet with a now legendary post:
“Already this morning I have killed a fox with a baseball bat, how is your Boxing Day going”
Maugham had already established his Good Law Project – good law bad at winning – and was quite prolific on the subject of Brexit. I told my friend and his colleagues that for the good of the reputation of his chambers Mr Maugham should voluntarily throw his phone into the Thames and agree to stay of Twitter for a period of grace.
Oddly enough Maugham seemed to adhere to this advice, for a bit, possibly aware he’d lampooned himself by adding the unnecessary detail to the world that during his act of fox slaughter he had been clad in his “wife’s too small green kimono”. But since self-awareness has never been his strong point, after a brief spell of online silence and repentance he left his Chambers and embarked on pontificating and litigating woke full time. A case of dropping his wife’s silk to take up his own.
The point about this entire bizarre and accidentally comedic incident and individual is not so much the random ingredients of an act of brutality, a baseball bat, a fox, a kimono, and Boxing Day but his demonstrable lack of self-awareness that as he kept tweeting, he was making everything worse for himself.
This summer he has taken the online baseball bat and beaten himself to a reputational pulp. He has become one of the most egregiously self-satisfied, self-righteous white knight grifters in the legal sphere.
He has taken the tragic death of Jason Arday and decided, as many have who wish to vigorously brush over Arday’s obvious flaws, and blamed it all, everything, on the media.
His latest wheeze is to go to subscribers of the Times. The Telegraph, The Mail, and the Spectator and suggest if you are ‘a decent human being’ that you cancel your subscriptions, for peddling racism, or in the real world – for investigating how a fabulist was made a poster boy for diversity in academia and promoted by people who seemed oblivious or uninterested in his obvious vulnerability.
Here’s the thing: Maugham is just the most egregious voice in this summer’s too loud chorus of an old and frankly very stupid canard.
“I love the free press, and free speech as long as it says what I think, attacks those I disagree with, and protects and lauds those with whom I am aligned”
Now not everyone loves journalists. I get that. Indeed one of the things I found hard as a BBC journalist (and boy do I have some issues with their journalism today) was that on the one hand they employed me to be an impartial and ethical voice to speak truth to power and at the same time across almost all genres of drama they’d portray any journalist character as a sleazy cheat who’d sell their own children for a scoop.
Yes, of course such characters exist but the idea all of them are either saint or sinner is absurd as suggesting any walk of life is like that, including lawyers, and politicians.
Kemi Badenoch does not instinctively like the press. She has had to learn to overcome that, to the point where she welcomes questions. When she became leader, she would rather have given Keir Starmer a foot massage than sit down for back to back interviews with the feral beasts of the lobby. One of the reasons I openly rate her, is how much she has overcome that instinct, and developed her own style of welcoming the press.
Andy Burnham, we know has been avoiding the press since he became Mayor of Britain. He, like Boris Johnson (who was a journalist) has found that he both enjoys blocking press access and scrutiny (perhaps not actually hiding in a fridge) but broadcasting himself on social media without the need for awkward questions, tricky editorial rules and embarrassing televised ‘gotchas’.
Politicians don’t like journalists because they ask awkward questions, and expose things they’d rather were not, not because journalists are inherently evil. Journalists need to accept that when it comes to covering politics their personal biases are actually quite hard to disguise, and those that don’t bother to are a problem for the rest.
Reform recently have had a quite schizophrenic approach to the newspapers, verging on the simplicity of ‘when they like us, they are organs with strong reputations in news, who are recognising what we are doing, and rightly exposing our opponents obvious flaws, and when they don’t, they are a cabal of Reform hating liars who do our opponents bidding and smear us’
This is as absurd as those who complain that ‘Reform are always on TV’, or that they have only been leading the polls ‘because the media gives them so much exposure’.
People you disagree with will always be on TV. Stories will appear that damage your cause or an individual’s reputation, but if they are true, that’s just tough, because a free press is a corner stone of democracy.
Sticking ‘Legacy’ or ‘mainstream’ or ‘right wing/left wing’ in front of the word media says more about you than it does about the media. Likewise ‘independent’ media is only really independent from rules and laws that in reality keep media broadly straight. Most independent media is in fact shackled to one form of political dogma so hard that it’s impossible to miss. I’d no more trust the Canary for impartiality than I would Nigel Farage’s Substack, and that’s not being mean to Nigel, why would his Substack be impartial, it’s not meant to be. He’d admit that, the Canary wouldn’t.
We here at ConservativeHome not only admit our bias but advertise it. The clue is in the name, but as I’ve said from the start as Editor the Conservative party no more tells me what to say or do than anyone else can. I just happen also to freely admit I’m a Conservative.
It has been odd to watch senior members of Reform in recent weeks respond with fury to articles about them from newspapers and outlets that have been relatively friendly to them and more interested in their agenda over the past two years.
Saying that the Times, the Telegraph and Spectator, and even (and I still can’t believe I’m writing this) Guido Fawkes are smearing them for writing articles that pose awkward questions for Reform (even when the offending articles contain praise too) is simply a sign of their tactics but complete lack of strategy.
Let’s not forget just a few months ago this is what Labour supporters were saying about the same newspapers and journalists for, according to them waging a war against Starmer.
GBNews, has so many Reform voices presenting on it, it could genuinely be ReformHome on TV, but I don’t want the station shut down, that’s not normal. The left would absolutely love to shut it down, they campaigned to shut it down, and thankfully though I have my criticisms they did not succeed.
The Conservatives have had long history of disliking the media so I don’t absolve them. I’ve been told plenty of times by a Tory or two, that journalists are some rungs down the ladder below pond life.
I still maintain that Edward Timpson, an actually very good Children’s Minister who knew his stuff but also cared, would have been a far bigger success in the role had he not loathed from top to bottom without exceptions, anyone in the media. He remained almost entirely hidden because he’d have nothing to do with the media if he could possibly help it.
But all of this, from whoever it comes, and whatever political direction is silly when it’s just ‘we like you when you’re nice to us, we hate you when you aren’t’.
What’s not silly but dangerous is when politicians start looking at shutting down and trying to gag a free press based entirely on their own political bias.
A number of parties, and notably the Greens this summer have suggested ways to restrict the media. Always they do so with the ‘best of intentions’ to righteously stop the media saying, or amplifying views they deem unacceptable and wrong.
The point about that is that no speech is right or wrong if it’s genuinely free.
You can have a free press with all its flaws and characters as a lynch pin of a healthy mature democracy or you can gag it and go down the route that all authoritarians do.
The first to go in any dictatorship are the people who ask awkward questions. So here’s one – do you think it’s normal, fair or even a sign of strength to try and gag those who disagree with you? If you do, you’re a wrong ‘un.