On 22nd February of this year I published the full judgment and my personal commentary in Court of Appeal’s judgment on Occupy the London Stock Exchange’s human rights. Amongst other matters, this judgment referred to an appeal by Paul Randle-Jolliffe. On 29th February of this year, I published a post entitled, Beware of Paul Randle-Jolliffe if you seek legal advice: he is a woo merchant. As per my usual practice, I adverised this post on twitter immediately after I’d published it:
(Click on images to enlarge them.)
That tweet went out at 12:56pm. At 1:03pm, I emailed Paul Randle-Jolliffe to notify him of what I had written and offer him a right of reply. Here’s the text of my email:
Paul,
As promised, I’ve written and today published a post exposing you as a legal woo merchant. I’ll give you a right of reply and publish that if you wish. You can email your response to this email address. I may publish further commentary on your woo. You can read the post on my blog but, for your convenience, here is the URL for the specific post which concerns you:
http://blog.scrapperduncan.
com/2012/02/29/beware-of-paul- randle-joliffe-if-you-seek- legal-advice-he-is-a-woo- merchant/
Scrapper Duncan
To date, I have not received a reply to this email. Paul Randle-Jolliffe received it – he included it in a complaint about me received by the Bar Standards Board on 12th March 2012. At the start of the section in the BSB’s form for giving the details of the complaint, he wrote:
Mr Roy has publish a villifying and personal attack on me in his blog that is personally and professionally damaging
Duncan Roy by email
29 Feb (4 days ago)
[sic]
He goes to particularise his complaint. In the section of the form which gives him an opportunity to say how he would like the complaint resolved, he has ticked a box marked “Disciplinary action” and another marked “Other”. In the box for more details next to other, he has written “Blog removal, Formal written apology and publication of apology on blog, compensation“. That is immediately above a sentence on the form stating, “(Please note that compensation is not available)”. His complaint also includes the allegation that I was instructed by a solicitor. He names a solicitor I instructed to represent Occupy the London Stock Exchange. She has never instructed me. I take issue with other aspects of his complaint but prefer not to detail all of that here. Yesterday, I noticed that Paul Randle-Jolliffe had retweeted the following:
Then he tweeted this:
The conversational thread continued:
Despite complaining to the Bar Standards Board about my use of the word “woo”, he then uses it himself:
By this point I have restricted on twitter myself to discussing when I might receive his libel proceedings. I’m ommitting my tweets in this thread and just publishing his. All these tweets are public. In future, I’ll be able to retrieve mine (so long as they are within my last 3,200, of course) but I cannot prevent him from deleting his, so this blog post is now a permanent record of what he tweeted in reference to me yesterday. He goes on:
there’s more:
Perhaps by “MoR”, he means the Master of the Rolls? He sent a tweet asking if I would accept service of legal proceedings by email and requesting my address if I did not. This morning I sent him a private direct message on twitter with a special email address which I set up just in order to receive service of his libel proceedings. I have instructed him not to share that email address with anyone.
Next up, a tweet from him which I did not understand at all:
Any clues, anyone? He keeps on coming, this time with some advice:
His next tweet I also struggled to understand completely. Obviously, I’m aware that “FOTL” means “freeman on the fand” and “FOFL” means “rolling on the floor laughing” but as to exactly what he is trying to say, I do not know. It can be hard with twitter.
So it would seem that Paul Randle-Jolliffe is about to launch libel proceedings against me, despite not exercising his right of reply. My offer to publish his reply still stands. Watch this space.