Guido readers may fondly remember Marcus J. Ball, the slimy attention seeker who last year made a big show of trying to take Boris Johnson to court for ‘lying’ during the EU referendum. His case was not only torn to shreds by the High Court, it also concluded that £350 million is an acceptable gross figure for Britain’s weekly EU bill…
Ball has now thrust himself back into the public eye, declaring on Twitter that because Boris is a “known liar” (something the British court system clearly disagrees with), he had no choice but to send an FoI request to St Thomas’s hospital to find out whether Boris and the medical professionals who treated him were telling the truth about his serious case of coronavirus:
I have sent an FOI request to St Thomas’s NHS Trust requesting confirmation/proof that @BorisJohnson wasn’t lying about being admitted there or the severity of his condition.
— Marcus J Ball #StopLyingInPolitics (@MarcusJBall) April 14, 2020
The PR timing is just too perfect. I fear that he may be dodging responsibility by becoming a victim.
Legal expert Marcus thinks medical records are FoI-able…
Beyond the distasteful crankery, Guido was particularly surprised to see Ball willing to add unnecessary work to the NHS’s to-do list, especially given last month Marcus closed his ‘Stop Lying in Politics’ crowdfunder on the basis “it is simply not practical to launch legal actions at this point. The courts are not functioning at full capacity and there is a great deal of uncertainty. It is not the appropriate time.”
Ball is happy to use the excuse when it allows him to scarper with over £50,000 he creamed from gullible Remainers, and conveniently forgets his concerns in order to attack a recovering PM…
Marcus J. Ball – the man who attempted, and failed, to prosecute Boris Johnson for lying to the public during the EU referendum – has been walloped by the courts with a £46,130.18 bill for Judicial Review proceedings, and a further £55,000 for Magistrates’ Court proceedings. The Pound Shop Wolf of Wallstreet will soon be worth even less than that…
Last month Ball said he was facing “financial ruin”, and these costs are unlikely to help with that situation. This judgement makes Ball’s smarmy fundraising pitch even funnier. This part in particular had the Guy Newsroom in stitches…
Read the scathing High Court costs judgment in full here…
Following ‘private prosecutor’ Marcus Ballsing up his case against Boris, the self styled ‘Brexit Justice’ campaigner has told LBC’s Nick Ferrari that he now faces financial ruin. After winning, the Government submitted a costs order to reclaim taxpayers’ money that had to be spent on the farcical case.
A very smug Ball originally attempted to raise £2 million from gullible Remainers in order to fight his case, which was quashed as judges ruled that £350m is an acceptable figure to use in the context of British contributions to the EU budget. Then the High Court rejected his appeal…
Ball insists he could still win and is attempting to string out the embarrassing saga by seeking judicial review of the High Court’s ruling. More and more Remainer money down the drain.
Wannabe ‘private prosecutor’ and general all-round freeloader charlatan Marcus J. Ball has lost another legal bid to get the courts to hear his ludicrous lawsuit against Boris Johnson. Despite the High Court utterly ripping his case to shreds and even finding that £350 million-a-week was acceptable as a gross figure, Ball had the temerity to launch another round of crowdfunding to try to dupe gullible Remainers into believing he had the slightest chance of getting his vanity project heard in the Supreme Court. When even snake-oil peddler-in-chief Jolyon Maugham thinks the money has been utterly wasted you know you’re not onto a winner…
The Court of Appeal unsurprisingly rejected his application for leave to appeal this morning. Ball is still left with the option of applying to the Supreme Court directly for permission, incredibly he has said he will carry on with his farcical attempts: “This isn’t over, we are not giving up. We are pursuing it, absolutely.” It’s Ball’s continuing attempts to con Remainiacs who don’t know better out of their cash that are starting to border on criminal…
UPDATE: Ball has responded with a frankly hilarious video statement on his Twitter account, promising that this rejection by the Court of Appeal is not the end of his public attention saga.
As well as tearing apart “private prosecutor” Marcus J. Ball for his comical attempt to bring a lawsuit against Boris over the £350 million a week figure, the High Court judgment also had something very interesting to say about the £350 million figure itself. Remain leaning legal commentators have ignored this bit of the Judge’s ruling:
“The alleged offence set out in the Application for Summons is that the Claimant “repeatedly made and endorsed false and misleading statements concerning the cost of the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union”. It appears that if the Claimant had said/endorsed a figure of £350m per week gross, or £250m per week net, there would have been no complaint.”
As Remain and Leave campaigners well know, Boris repeatedly did make it clear during the referendum that £350 million a week was the gross figure. Here he is on GMB in June 2016 explaining in detail over several minutes how £350 million a week/£20 billion a year is the gross figure while £10.5 billion a year is the net figure, he’s also explicit about the distinction on Marr and in numerous other speeches including the big BBC debate just before the referendum. Boris did exactly what the judges said he should have done for there to be no complaint. Case closed.
In news that surprised precisely no-one without severe Brexit Derangement Syndrome, the High Court resoundingly threw out the farcical anti-Boris lawsuit brought by smarmy “private prosecutor” Marcus J. Ball last month. The full judgment has now been released and it doesn’t make pretty reading for gullible Remainers who threw their money away on the crowdfunder. Hits them right in the Marcus J. Balls…
The case only got as far as it did because of a bizarre decision by a “District Judge”, in fact a lowly magistrate at Westminster Magistrates Court who was hopelessly out of her depth. The High Court judgment is absolutely scathing of both her decision and the case put forward by Balls’ legal team:
“The error of law… led the DJ to act in excess of jurisdiction and unlawfully by deciding to issue a summons whether the ingredients of the offence were not made out and which was outside the scope of the offence.
“Further, such an error of law necessarily involves a finding that no DJ properly directing herself… could, on the material before her, reasonably have found the offence made out…
“We are entirely unpersuaded by [Ball’s] argument…
“No authority was shown to us suggesting that the offence can be or has been equated to bringing an office into disrepute or misusing a platform outside the scope of the office.”
The judges then address the issue of whether the prosecution was vexatious. Ball hilariously tried to claim that his prosecution wasn’t politically motivated and went round deleting his old videos and websites in a vain attempt to cover-up the fact that he was indeed a massive Remoaner desperately trying to stop Brexit.
Unsurprisingly this didn’t fool the judges who list an entire catalogue of Ball’s bluster and make clear that they would have quashed the case on the vexatious grounds vexatious anyway, even without the serious legal flaws they had already identified. Amusingly they even include the interview where Ball said his “biggest responsibility” was to raise over £2 million as he had “run out of personal credit card and bank overdraft funding”. Ouch.
Incredibly, Ball is still saying that he wants to appeal the ruling despite his crushing defeat. Remainers surely can’t be stupid enough to give him yet more funding for his self-deluding fantasies… can they?
