Woke barrister Jolyon is going to find JK Rowling a far tougher opponent than the fox he beat to death

Telegraph

28-05-2025

I could almost feel sorry for someone who has such a high opinion of themselves that they liken themselves to Gandhi but find they have feet of clay.
'I identify with the great protesters in history, people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King,' said Jolyon Maugham KC.
I say 'almost'. But not quite. Because now this man has strayed into the issue of women's toilets and trans interlopers. And inevitably, he has taken aim at JK Rowling.
Posting on the social media site Bluesky, Maugham declared that 'for JK Rowling 'sex-based rights' are not the right to be paid the same as men, to live without sexual violence or coercion, to share the burden of unpaid labour, to escape the motherhood penalty or have domestic abuse taken seriously. They are about the exclusion of trans women. Mind-blowing.'
In her response on X (formerly Twitter), Rowling countered by saying that 'the only people who consider it 'anti-feminist' to point out that a woman is a woman by virtue of her biology are those who think female-specific anatomy or bodily functions are inferior in some way, that bearing young is a lowly, worthless occupation, or that misogynist social stereotypes are a worthier measure of who's a real woman'.
If you don't live on X – and no one remotely sensible does – you may not know Jolyon Maugham. He is known chiefly for two things. He was a staunch Remainer who tried to stop Brexit by helping block Boris Johnson's prorogation of Parliament. And in Scotland and at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg he tried, with other lawyers, to get Article 50 revoked so that we could not withdraw from the EU. This was soon overturned, and Maugham was miffed but still preening.
Yet there is something else he will be remembered for that is far more ignominious. On December 26 2019, he battered a fox to death. We know this because he tweeted about it. 'Already this morning I have killed a fox with a baseball bat. How's your Boxing Day going?' he posted. He then added that he was wearing his wife's too-small green kimono at the time. As you do. The RSPCA got involved.
Like everyone else, I wondered: 'Why on earth would you tweet that unless you needed constant attention or possibly a court case?' Maybe he thought it added to the gaiety of the nation.
Anyway, since Brexit is done, this KC, who made his fortune as a tax lawyer (which means exactly what you think it means: finding loopholes to help the very wealthy avoid tax through special schemes) and whose clients included Gary Barlow and Sir Alex Ferguson, has now become a fully fledged social justice warrior.
He set up the Good Law Project to crowdfund his various hobby horses and bring cases to court and, to put it politely, he's had mixed results. Obviously, plebs like you and I think that with court cases, winning or losing are straightforward outcomes by which to judge someone. But Jolyon is very special: 'Winning and losing is a silly metric,' he once said. 'We could win all our cases if we chose only to pursue easy ones. But that would be to sacrifice impact for vanity.' Righto.
He will also say things such as: 'We didn't lose. At a deeply technical level we lost. At every substantive level we won. It's not a good-faith assessment.' By 2022, of the 43 cases that the Good Law Project had funded with £4 million, it had won only eight.
And just as Stonewall moved into agitating for trans rights when its other objectives had been achieved, so Maugham has moved into activism on that same topic. Some of this may be driven through personal connections. But, increasingly, I would say it is driven by his absolute contempt for any woman who dares to disagree with him.
In 2023, he tried to stop the LGB Alliance, a group critical of trans activism, from becoming a charity, claiming it was funded by 'dark money'.
And what the hell is this recent fantasy? 'You are a predatory cis man and walk into the women's showers at the gym,' he mused last month on Bluesky. 'You are challenged and pretend to be a trans man. You are disbelieved because your penis is erect but you claim to be post-op and 'biologically female'. What then happens? And how does any of this protect women?'
What point does this make beyond an assertion of male privilege? He thinks about this stuff more than is healthy and the Supreme Court decision (that biological sex is a person's sex at birth) has, to use a technical term, made him even more insane in the membrane.
This thought noodle is so perplexing, I really don't think Maugham is doing trans people any favours at all either. In fact, I think he is taking their money under false pretences. The Good Law Project is challenging the Supreme Court outcome, but this cannot work.
In a now-deleted Bluesky post, he defamed Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, saying that nothing he said could be believed.
As the evidence on the harms of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones piles up, he has, in Rowling, picked on someone who has the cojones to put him in his place. He has the audacity to ask what she has done for women, trying to paint her as a transphobic bigot who cares little for women's equality. As a KC with a large number of staff, one might have thought someone would have informed him about all her decades of philanthropic work around women, children and domestic abuse survivors. Her private kindnesses and support are also legendary.
This man, though, calls her 'a billionaire cry-baby'. He won't care what I say. He blocked me a long time ago for being 'rude'. In other words, I challenged him. Still, I have had the dubious pleasure of once being at a dinner with him. We got an extra chair for his ego. He was droning on and I went out for a lot of 'smoking breaks'. (I don't smoke.)
He is now sailing close to the wind. The 'civil disobedience' that this social justice warrior is now proposing – urging trans women to ignore the Supreme Court ruling and use women's toilets – is an actual threat to women and their safety.
He equates single-sex spaces as being close to fascism. An intervention needs to be made. He needs to lie down in a darkened room for a bit. With an angry fox in it.