Guido readers will be dismayed to learn that luckless litigant Jolyon Maugham QC has suffered yet another crushing defeat at the hands of the law. This time a High Court judge rejected Jolyon’s attempts to cover his own backside against costs in his ludicrous case against Uber for not giving him a £1.06 VAT receipt. Jolyon says the case is about everyone paying their fair share of tax. Which is why the whole purpose of the case is to allow him to claim the VAT as a business expense and dodge the tax himself…

The judge rejected both Maugham’s ‘Protective Costs Order’ and his initial appeal, which would have limited Jolyon’s liability to just £20,000 if he lost the overall case, instead of being on the hook for Uber’s costs which could be over £1 million. The judge noted that the “named claimant has significant assets which he is not prepared, albeit for understandable reasons, to expose to the risk of an adverse costs order.” Too right – why should Jolyon have to give up any of his £400,000 annual net income while he’s pushing up Uber prices by 20% for everyone else?

More significantly, the judge said the fact that Jolyon had received “substantially more than 50% of the funding” from his case from the black cab trade, including one single contribution of £20,000, was very much a “relevant consideration” in the case. Jolyon never tires of talking about how he is acting in the public interest, the reality is that he is effectively now just acting on behalf of vested interests who want to push their competitors out of business and drive up prices for customers of their rivals…

Jolyon has put out a statement on his website all but admitting defeat, complete with a comical line at the bottom insisting that Jolyon is not in fact a serial loser:

Sore much?