Mick Hartley

More on Jolyon Maugham and his denial of defeat, here from Jo Bartosch at The Critic:

There is a whiff of the swivel-eyed 9/11 truther in Maugham’s telling — that official accounts cannot be taken at face value, that powerful forces are aligned against The Righteous, that GLP has privileged information about the way things really work.

Such face-saving guff is perhaps predictable — it is much easier on the ego to believe you are a brave truth teller and that they are out to get you. If I’d staked my reputation on the belief that sex can be changed with magic words, I too would prefer that story to the more prosaic reality that I was in the grip of a middle-aged messiah complex. (After all, championing a cause beloved of the young is a tried and tested method of postponing one’s political and personal twilight.)

Despite scepticism from many lawyers, social media silos ensure GLP’s claims still find an audience. Indeed, Kate Osborne MP has already publicly claimed that the ruling “confirmed that the EHRC’s code of practice got the law wrong” and other public figures have repeated these claims.

What transforms Maugham from an amusingly sore loser into something more concerning has been his sly suggestion that the system is rigged. Following the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment on biological sex last year, Maugham proposed that one of the judges “did it to please their dinner party friends.”

To believe there is a cabal out to get you, or to crush a cause you cherish, is immensely flattering. It casts you and your beliefs at the centre of events. Defeats become proof of the forces arrayed against you, of your own influence. Every loss fuels the belief that one is a crusader for truth, albeit in Maugham’s case, a suitably intersectional and decolonised one.

But Maugham is not some lone nutter who insists birds aren’t real on Rumble. He is a high profile lawyer heading a well funded campaign organisation with friends in Parliament and a loyal online following. However much he rages against the machine, he is part of it.

When people in that position imply judges cannot be trusted simply because they lost, or disseminate claims that muddy clear judgments, the damage is not to their pride but to public confidence in the rule of law. That is a high price to pay for saving face.

There are rumours that the Maughams have two trans children – which would certainly explain a lot.