Read on Twitter
A lesson in how not to Twitter - a THREAD featuring everybody's favourite activist QC, Jo Maugham (1/26)
This comes as Maugham continues to throws wild slurs at my employer and colleagues, and threatens to "point out the work ADF does", as he has done in defamatory terms on several occasions (2/26)
Perhaps it’s worth journeying back to a time not so long ago when Maugham first waded into the trans debate, supporting a fundraiser to reserve All Women shortlists for females (3/26)
The woke backlash he received was quite something, and so about-turned on his initial donation and apologised for a “careless intervention” (4/26)
(He even liked a Simpsons meme I sent him in response making light of his rapid turnaround!) https://twitter.com/LaurenceWilks/status/954052494912606213?s=20
Fast Forward a couple years to a “Open Democracy” (a “news” outlet that is a virtue signalling propaganda machine) hit job on ADF International balking about our finances, which Maugham retweeted and calling us “astro-turfed” (5/26)
Given his profile and large following, I called him out on a number of fronts, not least because his labelling ADF a “hate group” on the basis of a SPLC designation was completely biased and inaccurate, which he didn’t bother to respond to (6/26) https://twitter.com/LaurenceWilks/status/1109787137044611072
Then we had, erm, Foxgate, which saw Maugham proudly proclaim to the twitterverse that he had bashed in a fox in wearing his wife’s silk kimono, something that very few people would feel the need to broadcast to the entire world… (This is relevant, bear with me) (7/26)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was ridiculed pretty hard for his antics, which led to a self-imposed Twitter exile for some time, and on his return, he went on to Radio 4 and had a lovely little pity party where he lamented being the centre of a (self-inflicted) twitter storm (8/26)
The hypocrisy of his complaints wasn’t missed - @spikedonline wrote a scathing article in light of the way he viciously went after @darrengrimes_ in the wake of the Brexit vote (9/26) https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/03/10/the-shameless-hypocrisy-of-jolyon-maugham/
Sadly he returned to Twitter, and it wasn’t long before he started having a go at the lawyer involved in the Tavistock litigation on the basis that he was also taking on cases concerning abortion (10/26)
I called him out on his wonky understanding of consent (perhaps a tad provocatively) expecting a response (11/26) https://twitter.com/LaurenceWilks/status/1274384806755930112?s=20
I did end up getting a response, but not to the substantive question, and only after being blocked. His best shot was to reel off another barrage of defamatory slurs with no opportunity to respond (which I did anyway…) (12/26) https://twitter.com/LaurenceWilks/status/1275036835975135232?s=20
He also took great delight in the fact that prominent feminists had retweeted my one post and therefore “amplified” my employer. He later went on to claim that this showed GC feminists and the “religious right” were working “hand in glove” (13/26)
True that we probably wouldn’t agree on everything under the sun, but that fact he was so outraged that there was a hint of agreement on one issue reveals a lot. I’m not so ‘tribal’ that I have to agree with absolutely everything someone says (14/26) https://twitter.com/LaurenceWilks/status/1285641147214372864
I’m also not the first person he’s blocked instead of debating, there seem to be hundreds of women (no joke) who have been given the block for countering him (15/26) https://twitter.com/agedfashionista/status/1208703276167946245
His blocking of @BluskyeAllison for instance gives you a sense of how low his threshold for criticism is (16/26)
His patronising of women is something to behold (17/26) https://twitter.com/jmendelsohn77/status/1287035023330349056
He also has bullied the likes of @SVPhillimore for daring to challenge him, even threatening to get the legal regulator involved (18/26) https://twitter.com/SVPhillimore/status/1274980431482556418
(Again this coming from a man who supposedly takes a dim view of “cancel culture”) (19/26)
Then again this weekend, Maugham is so infuriated by the fact my fantastic colleague @LoisMcLatch made the front page of the he tweets out a ream of tired “hate group” accusations to try and undermine the actual threat posed by the Scottish Bill (20/26)
Then, after everything that happened after him post Foxgate - he calls fair game on @LoisMcLatch for being involved with ADF, which I have to say I think crosses a line (21/26)
So @LoisMcLatch responds to his slurs, and gets a pompous, narcissistic, patronising response and, you guessed it, a block to preserve his nice little echo chamber (22/26) https://twitter.com/LoisMcLatch/status/1287484614714499073?s=20
I go to the trouble of setting this all out to show that everything this man says should be taken with a pinch of salt, and don’t expect him to be reasonable or fair when he engages an issue (23/26)
I take great exception to being called a bigot, particularly when, on the evidence above, it is clear who the bigot really is. “Perform your values” his Twitter bio says - I’ll stick to mine, thanks (24/26)
I also hope this gets tweeted back to him every time he “points out” ADF work - although you can always go to the news part of the ADFI website if his coverage isn’t quite as frequent as you’d like (25/26)
Finally, if you’ve found yourself blocked/defamed/patronised by the man, here’s a pick-me-up that, of course, earned the talented @meggiefoster a block ENDS https://twitter.com/meggiefoster/status/1285201070533283842
