Twitter lawyer Jolyon Maugham is again trying to avoid being on the hook for his vanity legal proceedings. Court papers show that for the judicial review he launched against the Electoral Commission, Maugham has managed to persuade the judge to limit the costs he’d be liable for to £20,000, despite crowdfunding for the case and revealing that he had a secret donor who was willing to stump up £100,000 to guarantee any adverse costs.

Maugham has a history of using other people’s money to satisfy his own political agendas:

• He raised £107,650 in an effort to sue Uber over a VAT receipt (which he suspended when he realised he might have to cover Uber’s costs personally)
• £59,275 for a judicial review against David Davis (which he lost)
• £70,000 when he went to the High Court in Ireland to reverse the Article 50 process (which he lost)
• £76,925 to try to get the Scottish Court to ask the ECJ whether Parliament could unilaterally withdraw the Article 50 notification (which he lost)

In submissions to the High Court, Maugham claimed that the cost of the case would be £80,000, and the judge duly ordered that the Electoral Commission should be liable for £40,000 if they lose. This is despite Maugham admitting that he’d raised £62,492 by mid-May and had £27,290 left over from the Davis case which could be used, and revealing he had “received an email from an individual who will agree to guarantee any adverse costs up to the sum of £100,000, and her partner agreed a further indemnity of £2,000”. Tens of thousands of pounds worth of public money is going to wealthy middle class Remoaners to pursue a politically-motivated case…

Maugham has refused to make public the identities of his mystery wealthy backers. Jolyon revealed that a ‘private charitable trust’ has donated £5,000 to the Good Law Project, but guess what, these funders aren’t named either. Yet following the Charity Commission’s ruling that the Legatum Institute breached charity regulations, Maugham said that charities must “deliver the public good – not the ideological agenda of wealthy private donors”. If Maugham is such a bastion of transparency, why won’t he reveal the donors who are bankrolling his case against the Electoral Commission? What happened to his opposition to furthering the “ideological agenda of wealthy private donors”…