This week Jolyon has already apologised for pretending to win a case he actually lost, although it now seems this is standard practice for the Good Law Project: on the homepage of their website, they’re still proudly displaying their supposed court victory against Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings over the decision to award a contract to Public First. What they don’t tell potential donors is that the case was rejected on appeal in January…

It’s been a whole month since the Court of Appeal overturned the judgement, yet Jolyon’s still acting as though they brought the government to its knees. They even have a helpful timeline of events on the site, which happens to stop in February 2021, months before the appeal hearing and overturning decision. Here’s what the Judge said in January:

“…the fair-minded and informed observer, realising, amongst other things, that the use of a negotiated procedure without prior publication (with Public First) was strictly necessary because of the pandemic emergency, would not have found the absence of any formal record of the decision-making process indicative of apparent bias […]

For these reasons, the appeal will be allowed and the cross-appeal dismissed.”

When he admitted being wrong earlier this week, he tried placing the blame on the GLP’s “one (junior) comms officer”

We send stuff out across multiple channels - blogs, press releases, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Crowdjustice - and we should have message consistency and we didn't. Presently we have one (junior) comms officer and me. Responsibility for this is mine alone.

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) February 16, 2022

Which is odd, as the project’s Linkedin says they’ve got two…