JK Rowling vs Jolyon Maugham: a stunning social-media mismatch

There’s a fascinating character in pub-life legend: the would-be pugilist who isn’t any good at fighting but seems irresistibly drawn to it anyway. At closing time he will habitually ‘square up’ to the hardest-looking man in the bar (‘tough guy’ film stars often remark that this happens a lot to them), and come out with something along the lines of: ‘Oi! Think you’re hard, dontcha? Put ’em up! What’s wrong – aren’t I worth hitting?’ Generally the tough guy will laugh it off and scarper, and the weakling will be decanted into a taxi by his embarrassed mates, only for the whole mini-drama of tormented masculinity to take place yet again when strong drink is taken in public.

I think of this every time the strange little lawyer, Jolyon Maugham, pops up on social media. As Gareth Roberts wrote on his majestic ‘Middle Class Holes’ Substack series:

‘How can Jolyon Maugham KC… possibly be real? A pompous celebrity barrister who lives in a windmill – really? From the pen of Tom Sharpe or Kingsley Amis, acceptable. But in the solid, jowly flesh? No. He is simply too ludicrous, too extreme, to be credible.’

He seems a glutton for punishment, to say the least – Private Eye recently detailed his Good Law Project’s long list of failures. Given the merest glimpse of a dead horse, from Remain to transvestites’ ‘rights’, he will rush to, if not put his own money on it, then certainly start up a crowdfunder. No doubt he has more important things to do with his personal fortune, such as restore his aforementioned Sussex windmill.

In 2013, my local paper, the Argus, reported that Maugham, having bought the Grade II-listed Jack windmill at Clayton for £1.1million in 2012, had submitted plans to the South Downs National Park Authority for a ‘massive’ restoration project. Maugham told the Argus that he and his wife had ‘decided we wanted the windmill before we even saw it. I grew up in New Zealand with great views and I wanted to have that again. We were looking for somewhere with a lot of space for the children and we couldn’t find it in London so we started looking further afield and found this.’

Like his fellow eccentric comrade, Billy Bragg (who resides in rural splendour in Dorset), Maugham is one of those people who very much approves of diversity for others but apparently prefers a more un-diverse universe for his special self and loved ones. There’s also the fact that Maugham was a tax specialist before he went full-on social-justice warrior. All of this hardly speaks of a pure soul with an Atticus Finch-like hunger for justice.

Something may have since gone awry with the bucolic fantasy. By 2020, Guido Fawkes was reporting that the seven-bedroomed dream home was on Rightmove for a whopping £3million: ‘Guido wonders if Jolyon’s strapped for cash after his successive high-profile court defeats…’

And now Maugham’s gone into ‘bat’ against JK Rowling on social media. There’s never really a good time to take on this great woman, who has been alchemised by righteous conflict over the years from rather mousey little lover of consensus to warrior queen. Think of that photograph of her drinking a cocktail and smoking a cigar on a yacht with the words, ‘I love it when a plan comes together’, after the UK Supreme Court ruling on what a woman is. But she’s looking especially dynamic and unassailable now, high on her own velocity, with the new HBO version of the Harry Potter series, produced by JKR herself, in the pipeline and aiming to ‘lead a new generation of fandom’. I don’t know what that means, but it’s surely going to distress whole swathes of blue-haired sobbers, so job done. Although I believe that adults who read about ‘young wizards’ should have their voting rights removed (like prisoners and lunatics), the criminal insanity of Rowling’s antagonists will be pushed to the max by the fact that a new generation of youngsters will become fans of her work, unbothered by or perhaps even hostile to her accusers.

In the fantasy realm, so it is in reality. As reported in the Daily Mail last week, Rowling is now ready to back the cases of every woman wronged at work for speaking the truth about sex through the JK Rowling Women’s Fund. As the Mail’s Euan McColm put it, this fund ‘will transform the battlefield when it comes to women discriminated against for their legitimate, reality-based views. Let the nation’s human-resources departments brace themselves.’

And in the turquoise, pink and white corner, we have Maugham – a man with a name of a mimsy moron in a PG Wodehouse novel, and a mouth like a cat’s anus, wearing his wife’s kimono (aka a woman’s dressing gown), wielding a baseball bat and standing over a dead fox, the big old butch warrior. The words ‘never learn’ come to mind when it comes to mere mortal men taking on JKR. Maugham must know she’s going to masticate, macerate and desiccate him every time he calls her out. Does he like the attention? Is he addicted to the limelight even when it shines on his worst features? Why does he keep doing it? Ours not to reason why, perhaps, but just to lay back and enjoy the ensuing X-spats, such as the most recent one between the two. After Maugham had alleged Rowling was ‘anti-trans’, ‘amoral’ and a ‘bigot’, who’s ‘waging war’ against trans people, Rowling chuckled:

‘Jolyon, calm down. You’re getting testerical… As a top-notch legal brain primarily known for defending an attempted tax dodge (Icebreaker), and losing, and for his many crowdfunded losses in court, including the case where you tried to shut down an LGB-rights charity, I assumed you’d take it for granted that my lawyers would be keeping a close eye out for comments that stray into defamation. If we ever end up facing each other in court, my only qualm will be that it seems such a huge waste of taxpayers’ money to have to construct a courtroom large enough to accommodate your ego.’

Does Maugham have some kind of professional death-wish? It’s hard to read his claim, made elsewhere, that the Supreme Court judges responsible for ruling on what a woman is may have been ‘got at by transphobes’ without suspecting so. Whatever the cause, he’s now raising funds to ‘stop the UK’s attack on trans people’ by arguing that the Supreme Court’s judgement violates the Human Rights Act. As the Spectator amusingly snarked:

‘It’s hard to say who might win this case. On one hand we have five Supreme Court justices in unanimous agreement. On the other we have Maugham’s Good Law Project; since 2017 its crowdfunded cases have had a success rate of roughly 10 per cent.’

It’s unlikely that Maugham will ever run into Rowling in a pub at closing time, but in the absence of this final fantasy fulfilled, let us appreciate how he adds to the gaiety of nations with his tireless windmill-tilting.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.