“If you want to shape the society you live in, ultimately you have to want to be in Parliament,” he says. “That’s where I want to be.”
Unconventional
In many ways, Maugham is a contradictory figure. “People don’t know quite how to place me,” he says. Having reached the top of the legal profession in London with all the wealth and prestige that entails, he’s self-consciously a member of the Metropolitan elite.
At the same time, his background is unconventional, at least for a top lawyer or a potential member of Parliament. He was raised in New Zealand by a English mother, left home at 16, worked as a cleaner and moved to London at age 17 to find his estranged father, David Benedictus, a playwright and author.
Maugham’s left-wing, an on/off member of the Labour Party, while making a living defending tax practices that some liberals find abhorrent.
He has spent years representing investors in Eclipse Film Partners No. 35, one of a number of controversial partnerships set up to exploit tax breaks on British movies that were later challenged by the government and found to be artificial -- legal but more about reducing taxes than boosting the film industry.
Taxes
Tax specialists are some of the best-paid lawyers in London -- and Maugham describes himself as “middle-class prosperous.”
Tim Levy, whose company created Eclipse, says he found Maugham to be “open, engaging, non-judgmental and intellectually curious.” Levy says Maugham never shared his political views with him.
Maugham started a tax blog that expressed opinions that many lawyers and accountants would never put their names to. “I argued repeatedly in the tax world that there was morality in tax,” he says. Legal colleagues called it career suicide, he recalls.