Dan Hodges Misleads On Maugham

As alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson continues to bluster, deflect and tell flat-out porkies in response to any question remotely related to Partygate, so his cheerleaders in the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press continue with their own brand of deflection and misinformation, in their bottom-of-the-bill manner.

He's desperate, Dan

This includes the Mail on Sunday’s not even slightly celebrated blues artiste Whinging Dan Hodges, a worthy successor to Peter McKay as The World’s Worst Columnist, who has today brought readers “A fox-killing lawyer, his bombastic claims - and the grotesque indulgence that is clogging our courts” in an attempt to smear Jo Maugham.

The central part of that headline - that Maugham’s activities are “clogging our courts” - is what the MoS wants readers to take away as fact. But it isn’t: while Hodges tells “according to the most recent NAO report, there is a post-Covid logjam of 61,000 crown court cases, including rape and other serious sexual assaults, and over 360,000 magistrates’ court cases”, this has nothing to do with Maugham.

Indeed, he effectively admits it in the next sentence: “Although Maugham’s actions take place in civil courts”. Thus the get-out clause: he and the MoS can claim that the facts were all there in the article. That the Mail titles set the agenda for their readers with the headline, and bury the less convenient bits, is not allowed to enter.

Several pundits lined up to pass severely adverse comment on Hodges’ screed. Julia Grace Patterson, who you can tell as she’s a doctor, was one: “This article is a hollow attack, nothing more. I hope that anyone who reads it understands that right-wing media and the government are desperate to pull down those holding them to account”.

Lawyer Raj Chada was another. “The backlog in the criminal courts is absolutely nothing , nothing to do with the litigation that [Maugham] brings in the civil courts. The ‘background context’ that you suggest is meaningless … The danger of this type of disingenuous juxtaposition is that it plays to Government rhetoric that backlogs are caused by lawyers”. As with the Home Office moaning about appeals to stop forced deportations.

And the Secret Barrister was particularly severe. "The reference to the criminal courts backlog is misleading and dishonest. There is simply no link at all between the GLP’s litigation and the delays in the Crown Courts caused by government cuts. You should amend this article … Instead, you appear to have bolstered the wholly false government propaganda that seeks to blame the criminal courts backlog on everything other than the government’s own wanton mismanagement. Why on earth you would do this is a mystery”.

But there will be no amendment of the article: Hodges will hide behind the MoS, the MoS in turn will hide behind sham press regulator IPSO, and IPSO will wipe the MoS’ arse for it. While the MoS plays both sides of the fox-killing field: witness the MoS headline “MPs in battle to unmask brutal hunt saboteurs: Police 'need new powers' as thugs get away with wave of attacks”. Killing foxes is bad today. Not long ago, stopping the killing was bad.

Look who's been setting the Maugham-bashing agenda

Worse, though, is what Hodges will not be telling his readers: the attack on Maugham has been led by the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog. Taking your lead from “the provisional wing of CCHQ”? That makes you a party stooge.

Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by becoming a Patron on Patreon at

https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton