London Barrister Jolyon Maugham hit the social media headlines for killing a fox with a baseball bat over a year ago. At least one big law firm hasn’t forgotten. It’s a ‘shocking abuse of power’, he says.

Jolyon Maugham is a director of the Good Law Project, and claims that ‘Magic Circle’ law firm Allen & Overy has refused to give him or other members of the Devereux Chambers any work as long as he was still among the roster of civil litigation barristers there.

The controversy arose after he had tweeted about using a baseball bat to kill a fox that had entered the henhouse – where else?

He wrote on the social media site on Sunday: “Am remembering when Allen & Overy’s head of litigation told my old chambers that, so long as I was in chambers, not only would they not send any work to me, but they would not send any work to any other members of chambers either.”

“They later withdrew the ban on sending work to my old Chambers – goodness alone knows how they thought they could square it with their duty to their own clients – but it remains one of the most shocking abuses of power by City blue bloods I have seen,” he added.

There was no prosecution of Maugham by animal authorities in the UK. He said his chickens “were very distressed by the fox”.

In his post fox-killing tweets, Maugham said that he awoke with a wee hangover – “slightly post-Xmas” – when he spied the fox, a big one, trapped in the netting he had arranged to protect his backyard chickens.

That’s when he donned his wife Claire’s green satin kimono and grabbed the bat, he said.

“I didn’t especially enjoy killing it but I imagine that’s what the RSPCA would have done, if they had anyone on call in Central London on Boxing Day,” he tweeted.