Now for the scathing review of Jolyon’s book by Yuan Yi Zhu in the Times.

How to explain the rather indefinite but very real fame of Maugham to those who do not tweet? Well, you see, he was a successful but obscure tax barrister. Then he started a mildly successful blog, which led to him advising the Labour Party on tax policy and even to fleeting fantasies of becoming attorney-general in the House of Lords in an Ed Miliband government.

But what really made him famous was his energetic abuse of anyone who disagreed with him on Twitter…

That yes but I think his colossal ego also played a large part. It really is a sight to behold.

For instance there’s the attention to his martyrdom over The Fox and the Kimono.

His account of the inner-London fox hunt is spread across eight pages and ends with him quoting, in full, the long statement he issued on Twitter (where else?) after the RSPCA declined to prosecute him. He compares his calvary to that of Caroline Flack, the television presenter bullied into suicide by social media. The reader will be glad to know that for him “the pain of it all has faded somewhat”. For the fox as well, one hopes.

I take it there’s nothing about our pain.

One more thing the reader should know about our brave hero Maugham is that he is a King’s Counsel. If the big blue letters “KC” on the cover escaped your notice, he refers to his exalted rank at least 13 times in the body of the book alone; on four of those, he reassures the reader that he wasn’t interested in taking silk for the money it would bring (how much money he could be making in private practice instead of pursuing his noble activism is another of the book’s leitmotifs).

…

Several chapters are dedicated to cases he brought through the Good Law Project, the Goliath-slaying private company he founded to sue the government with money donated by gullible laymen, with a dismal success rate. One chapter concerns a judicial review against the awarding of some contracts during Covid. The judge found part of the process unlawful, but that it made no difference to the eventual outcome, and refused to grant declaratory relief — in substance, a pathetic defeat for Maugham.

But “at least from my perspective, it didn’t really matter . . . The might of the crowd — we had received over 16,000 separate donations — helped us expose a series of transactions that stank of sleaze.” In other words, throw enough mud and some will stick. This is a refreshingly frank admission, but one which does him no credit.

The real crime of this book is not that its author is insufferable. It is not that he displays an ugly streak of meanness against anyone who disagrees with him. It is that it is unbearably boring. Lawyers are supposed to be in love with the sound of their own voices; Maugham is also in love with his own prose.

He quotes his own blog posts, interviews, tweets. The man is a fountain of vanity.

Page after page, we are treated to ponderous declarations and clumsy narrations, some of which literally make no sense. It is all downhill from the book’s very first, unforgivable sentence: “The life I have is hard, but I got to choose it, and the road that brought me here I did not.” Is this a song lyric? What does it even mean? Does Penguin no longer employ editors? Give your money to the RSPCA but please do not buy this book. Maugham is a first-time author who should not be encouraged to reoffend ever again.

I promise not to buy this book!