Horsfield Menzies : Blog vs Behaviour – ANGUS MENZIES WROTE THE FUCKING PLAYBOOK

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Most Blog vs Behaviour articles require TCAP to place two documents beside each other, work through the chronology and gradually expose the contradiction. This one requires considerably less excavation. On 28 April 2022, Horsfield Menzies partner Angus Menzies published an article called “What a Relief!” about whistleblowers, employers, Employment Tribunals and the practical reality of trying to remain in litigation long enough to have a claim heard. It is an extraordinary little document, not because Angus discovers some obscure point of employment law, but because he simply fucking says the quiet part out loud.

Angus explains how somebody who raises concerns can become the target instead. Employers can convince themselves that the difficult individual is the real problem, after which investigations, disciplinary processes, capability procedures and other mechanisms redirect attention away from whatever was originally raised and towards the person who raised it. That observation would already make the article interesting enough for Blog vs Behaviour. Then Angus gets to the lawyers.

According to Angus, employers and their lawyers have become skilled at “kicking the whistle blowing claim can down the road”. Lengthy Tribunal proceedings, he explains, demand money, time and emotional investment from somebody who may already have lost their income. Eventually, the claimant may “give up, settle low, [or] run out of money”, which Angus observes can amount to a “decent result” from the employer’s perspective.

Fuck me.

We have found the manual.

Angus Explains Attrition

It is worth understanding precisely what Angus is describing because the mechanics extend far beyond whistleblowing. Litigation does not occur between abstract legal propositions floating serenely above the parties. It happens between actual human beings with radically different amounts of money, stamina, professional support, time and capacity for prolonged conflict. A claimant can possess evidence, an arguable case and complete sincerity about what happened, yet still lose the war of endurance before anybody finally determines the underlying facts.

Procedure has a cost. Delay has a cost. Applications need answering, bundles need reading, evidence needs preparing and peripheral arguments consume energy that could otherwise go into proving the central allegation. Meanwhile, a corporate respondent continues trading, its solicitors continue billing and its managers return to their ordinary lives when the working day finishes. The claimant takes the fucking case home.

Angus understood that perfectly in 2022. Indeed, the entire importance of the interim-relief mechanism discussed in his article is that continuing somebody’s income can help them stay the course until the substantive dispute reaches determination. The implication is obvious because Angus identifies the alternative himself: without that economic protection, somebody may simply run out of resources before the merits ever get their day.

That is not some radical TCAP theory about inequality inside litigation. It is the financial physics described by a partner of Horsfield Menzies.

Then Horsfield Menzies Met Lee Thompson

My Cepac claim was not a whistleblowing claim. It concerned disability discrimination arising from recruitment, so the legal cause of action was different. The practical dynamics Angus described, however, were strikingly familiar.

I was an unemployed litigant in person. Cepac was a corporate respondent represented by specialist employment solicitors. The factual dispute began with a recruitment conversation on 21 August 2024 in which I say Page Outsourcing offered me an interview, discussed the salary and then asked about the gap in my employment history. During that same conversation, I disclosed that the gap related to my mental health.

A contemporaneous WhatsApp sent that day recorded “Interview next week” and the training salary. The expected confirmation never arrived, while Cepac later denied that an interview had been offered. Therefore, the essential merits questions were hardly impossible to identify: what happened during the recruitment call, what Page recorded, what health information travelled through the process and why the expected interview disappeared.

Employment Judge T. R. Smith later described the proceedings as a “simple claim”. By then, however, the Tribunal file stood at approximately 1,941 pages.

Apparently somebody had misplaced simple.

From Merits To Endurance Test

Horsfield Menzies had already served a bundle exceeding 600 pages for a preliminary hearing in May 2025. By April 2026, the main hearing bundle had reached 1,657 pages excluding its index, while dedicated collections of my communications, blog material and X posts occupied another 191 pages of curated conduct evidence within the wider case material. The recruitment issue itself had not somehow become another thousand pages more complicated. The litigation constructed around the claimant had.

Medical evidence became contested territory, as did hearing attendance, correspondence, complaints and my reactions to the proceedings. Previous litigation entered the picture. TCAP entered the picture. X posts entered the picture. Gradually, material about the person bringing the discrimination allegation became increasingly useful to arguments about whether that person should remain entitled to bring it.

That distinction matters because Angus had already explained what procedural endurance can achieve. A claimant does not necessarily need to lose the original factual dispute if continuing towards determination becomes expensive, exhausting and dangerous enough to become the larger problem. In Angus’s whistleblowing example, employers and lawyers demand particulars, put allegations to strict proof and keep pushing the claim further down the road. In Cepac, Horsfield Menzies helped construct a procedural environment involving huge bundles, detailed conduct arguments, substantial costs pressure and ultimately an application to strike the claim out.

Different instruments, perhaps.

Same fucking pressure gauge.

Make The Complainant The Problem

The other side of Fungus’s article is even more uncomfortable. He describes the institutional process by which somebody who raises concerns can gradually become reclassified as the problem. Instead of continuing to ask whether the underlying allegation has merit, managers begin examining the individual who made it. Suddenly that person is difficult, troublesome, poorly performing, unreasonable or otherwise deserving of scrutiny.

Once that transition occurs, the centre of gravity moves. What began as an allegation about institutional conduct becomes an inquiry into the complainant’s conduct. Their emails matter, their tone matters, their reactions matter and their behaviour becomes increasingly capable of eclipsing whatever they originally asked somebody to investigate. The person who initially pointed towards a problem eventually discovers the institution pointing back.

Angus warns employers about precisely that phenomenon. Then look at Cepac.

The discrimination allegation began with recruitment and a mental-health disclosure, yet by the decisive stages of the proceedings the respondents had constructed an extensive evidential case around me. My emails, complaints, language, reactions, blog, X account, previous litigation and conduct all became material. Eventually, the Tribunal was no longer being asked merely whether disability discrimination occurred during recruitment; it was being asked whether Lee Thompson’s conduct meant the litigation should continue at all.

Angus had already drawn the fucking diagram.

191 Pages Of The Problematic Individual

The arithmetic makes that transformation especially stark. By April 2026, dedicated strike-out collections contained 191 pages of communications, blogs and X material. Those pages did not compile themselves. Somebody selected the material, somebody organised it and somebody decided that the claimant’s reactions were sufficiently important to package as documentary evidence about his conduct.

Meanwhile, the original factual questions remained unresolved. The Tribunal never completed a merits determination of whether Page offered the interview, why the expected confirmation disappeared or how the health information travelled through the recruitment process. Yet enormous documentary energy had been directed elsewhere, towards the behaviour and characterisation of the person asking those questions.

That is precisely why Angus’s 2022 article is so useful. He understood years beforehand that institutional focus can migrate from the allegation to the person making it. Better still, he understood the language through which that transformation occurs: the difficult individual, the troublemaker, the problematic employee. You hardly need an elaborate theory of institutional retaliation when the partner of the law firm has already written the fucking subtitles.

Then I Complained To Fungus

There is another reason “What a Relief!” belongs in Blog vs Behaviour rather than merely being an interesting item from the Horsfield Menzies archive. Angus eventually became part of the chronology himself.

On 23 March 2025, before TCAP turned Horsfield Menzies into an enduring search-engine experience, I sent a detailed private complaint about Senior Associate Sam Butler directly to Angus Menzies, Simon Horsfield and Daniel Rubin. The complaint raised alleged misuse of disability-related medical information, contact involving my GP or medical centre, disputed statements during the litigation, aggressive costs pressure and obstructive case correspondence. I asked the firm’s senior lawyers to investigate what had happened.

The following day, I chased the complaint and asked whether an investigation would take place and when an outcome could be expected. No investigation outcome was communicated to me. That is already interesting when viewed against the public employment-law standards Horsfield Menzies repeatedly publishes, but it becomes considerably more interesting once Angus’s own article enters the room.

Three years earlier, Angus had explained that good employers should take concerns seriously, listen properly, investigate with an open mind, acknowledge failings and make necessary changes. He also warned against automatically treating the person raising concerns as though they were attacking the organisation. Then a serious complaint about the conduct of his own firm landed directly with him.

I did not ask Angus to accept every allegation because I had typed it into an email. I asked for an investigation.

No outcome came back.

The Investigative Machinery Had A Directional Setting

While the complaint about Horsfield Menzies disappeared into whatever internal process may or may not have existed, the firm’s appetite for investigating the complainant was considerably easier to observe. Emails could be gathered, blog posts could be gathered, X posts could be gathered and Tribunal history could be gathered. Medical material became part of the litigation environment, while my medical centre was contacted when information concerning appointment availability became relevant to opposing a postponement request.

Apparently the investigative machinery worked perfectly well. It simply had a fucking directional setting.

That contrast is the Blog vs Behaviour problem. Angus’s public article says organisations should listen to people raising concerns, investigate properly and resist the temptation to turn the complainant into the problem. The later Horsfield Menzies record shows extraordinary documentary enthusiasm for the complainant while no investigation outcome concerning his complaint about Horsfield Menzies was ever communicated to him.

The contradiction does not require decoration.

It just requires both files to remain open at the same time.

Do Not Make A Mountain Out Of A Molehill

Fungus also warns employers against responding too aggressively to alleged misconduct by somebody who has raised concerns. Consistency matters because an unusually robust response can itself begin to resemble retaliation. His practical point is simple enough: do not manufacture a mountain from behaviour that would have remained a molehill had somebody else done it.

Now open the Cepac material. By April 2026, my communications, articles and X posts had become their own curated evidential collection, while the respondents were no longer merely answering a recruitment discrimination allegation. They were constructing an extensive procedural case about the claimant responsible for bringing it.

The mountain had fucking tabs.

That remains one of the strangest features of the entire litigation. The original recruitment dispute remained compact enough for a duty judge to call the proceedings simple, yet the procedural architecture surrounding the person bringing that dispute became enormous. The WhatsApp did not suddenly grow another thousand pages. The interview allegation did not require an encyclopaedia.

The claimant became the expanding subject.

Again, Angus had already explained why organisations should be extremely careful about doing exactly that.

Stay The Course

One section of “What a Relief!” deserves particular attention because it makes the financial dynamic explicit. Angus explains that whistleblowing cases can run for months or years and require serious legal expenditure and emotional investment. Someone who has just lost their employment may therefore struggle to finance the journey from allegation to final determination.

Interim relief changes that equation because a successful claimant can retain an income while the substantive claim continues. Why does that matter? Because it improves their ability to remain in the litigation long enough for the underlying case to be heard.

That is the fucking tell.

Litigation is not merely a test of who has the better legal argument. Economic survival affects access to the finish line, and Angus plainly understood that. So did Horsfield Menzies. Employment lawyers generally understand it because they watch the imbalance operate every day.

Now put the financial landscape of Cepac beside the article. I was unemployed and representing myself, while Cepac had Horsfield Menzies. By the final stages, Cepac’s combined costs schedules exceeded £50,000. The claim was subsequently struck out and a £20,000 costs order followed, while the underlying recruitment merits never received completed determination.

If you wanted a laboratory demonstration of the relationship between money, procedure and endurance, you could hardly design a cleaner fucking exhibit.

£50,000 Says Hello

Costs pressure becomes particularly interesting when read through Angus’s explanation of attrition. A corporate respondent can incur tens of thousands of pounds in litigation and treat that expenditure as the professional cost of defending a business interest. An unemployed claimant can look at precisely the same number and see personal catastrophe.

That imbalance exists without anybody doing anything improper. The important question is how parties and lawyers choose to operate within it.

In Cepac, costs pressure formed part of the litigation environment well before the final order. My March 2025 complaint to Angus Menzies and the other recipients expressly raised what I regarded as aggressive costs pressure against an unrepresented disabled claimant. Angus therefore did not need TCAP to explain years later how financially asymmetric litigation can affect the person on the other side; his own 2022 article already set out the mechanism.

Eventually, the case produced a £20,000 costs order without the underlying discrimination allegation receiving a completed merits hearing.

What a relief.

The Original Question Never Needed An Answer

This is where the comparison lands hardest. Horsfield Menzies did not ultimately need Cepac to defeat the recruitment allegation following a completed examination of the recruitment evidence because the proceedings ended first.

The contemporaneous WhatsApp remained. The disputed interview remained disputed, the questions surrounding health information remained unresolved and the expected confirmation remained unexplained. What disappeared was the merits hearing capable of reaching final findings on those issues.

Instead, the procedural case reached judgment.

That is why Angus’s article is more than amusing hindsight. Years before Horsfield Menzies represented Cepac, one of its founding partners had already described how time, procedure, legal expense and human endurance interact. He knew that prolonged litigation could cause claimants to abandon cases, accept less or exhaust the resources required to continue. He knew that turning attention towards the complainant could become dangerous, and he understood why an overly robust response to somebody raising concerns might itself look retaliatory.

Most importantly, Angus understood that maintaining a claimant’s income can determine whether that claimant remains capable of staying the course.

He did not merely understand employment law.

He understood the fucking battlefield.

“A Decent Result”

Fungus’s “decent result” formulation is especially revealing, not because the article celebrates impoverishing claimants, because it does not. The piece ultimately warns employers about mishandling whistleblowers. What matters is that Angus understands the calculation well enough to describe the commercial logic from the employer’s side.

A claim can drag on while money disappears and the claimant becomes exhausted. Settlement expectations may fall. Eventually, the person might accept substantially less or abandon the fight entirely. From the corporate perspective, Angus recognises that such an outcome can look satisfactory even though the underlying factual allegations have never been vindicated or disproved through a completed merits hearing.

Now compare that mechanism with Cepac. The claim became enormous, the claimant became increasingly central to the procedural dispute and costs pressure escalated. The respondents ultimately advanced a strike-out case around conduct, the decisive hearing proceeded without me and the claims disappeared without completed determination of the recruitment merits.

A £20,000 costs order followed.

Apparently the only thing missing was a fucking party popper.

Angus Menzies Had The Quiet Version

There is something else that makes the chronology particularly uncomfortable. Fungus received my complaint privately in March 2025. He was not discovering my concerns eighteen months later through an article engineered for Google, nor was he encountering them after Blog vs Behaviour had made the firm’s name a recurring feature of TCAP.

I used the professional route first.

The complaint expressly raised costs pressure and the treatment of disability-related material. In substance, it told senior people at Horsfield Menzies that I believed aspects of the litigation conduct itself had become improper and harmful. Angus had already spent years understanding exactly what adversarial pressure can do to somebody who lacks equivalent institutional resources, because his own fucking article explains it.

No investigation outcome came back to me. The litigation continued, the procedural architecture expanded and eventually the claimant became the problem that swallowed the claim.

That chronology matters because it removes the convenient suggestion that Angus could only have understood the complaint after the dispute had become public and hostile. He had the quiet version first.

The Article Is Called “What A Relief!”

You almost have to admire the title. Angus uses “What a Relief!” to describe the dangerous satisfaction an organisation may feel after finally getting rid of somebody it has decided is difficult. Four years later, Horsfield Menzies helped Cepac obtain an altogether different form of relief.

The discrimination proceedings disappeared before a completed merits hearing. No final factual determination resolved the interview dispute, and the central recruitment questions remained unanswered. What remained instead was strike-out, substantial costs and a gigantic procedural record surrounding a relatively compact recruitment allegation.

That does not make the two situations legally identical, nor does it need to. Blog vs Behaviour is about the collision between published insight and later conduct. Angus had publicly described the danger of institutions moving their attention from the concern to the troublesome person, understood how litigation attrition could exhaust claimants and explained why lawyers knew how to exploit delay and procedural burden.

Then came the fucking Cepac file.

What a relief.

He Wrote The Playbook

That is why “What a Relief!” may be one of the purest documents TCAP has found in the Horsfield Menzies archive. Angus Menzies, Fungus to friends, did not predict the Cepac litigation, but he described many of the mechanisms that later make the record so uncomfortable to read beside his article.

He described the person raising concerns becoming the difficult individual. He described employers investigating and escalating the conduct of that individual. And he understood procedural delay, strict proof, legal expenditure and the economic vulnerability of somebody who had lost their income. Most remarkably, he expressly recognised that prolonged litigation could end with claimants giving up, settling cheaply or simply exhausting their money, and that employers might regard such an outcome as perfectly satisfactory.

Dirty. Fucking. Cunt.

Around three years later after his cunt article, a disabled unemployed litigant sent Fungus a private complaint about his own firm’s litigation conduct. No investigation outcome was communicated. Horsfield Menzies continued representing Cepac while a judicially described simple claim became a sprawling procedural fight. The claimant’s reactions became evidence, the costs schedules exceeded £50,000, the merits never received a completed hearing, the claims were struck out and £20,000 in costs followed.

All the while, Fungus’s old article sat quietly on the Horsfield Menzies website explaining the fucking physics.

Blog vs Behaviour sometimes requires interpretation.

This one came with instructions.

ANGUS MENZIES WROTE THE FUCKING PLAYBOOK.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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