“Nice try pal”
A man who sold “empathy that lasts” to clients marched into court, painted a disabled defendant as evasive, called a car a write-off, said it would not pass an MOT, lost the claim, and then watched the same car pass an MOT anyway. Readers can decide the label.
On paper, Jago Livingstone looks like the sort of bloke who should know better.
Monkey Nuts Studio Ltd sells inclusion. Its “Inclusive by Design” pitch talks about lived experience, empathy and better products for disabled people. The branding is all warmth and conscience. The public face is careful. The language is polished. The values are framed as obvious.
Then real life turned up.
Jago issued a small-claims case over a private sale Nissan 350Z and advanced a story that, stripped of garnish, boiled down to this: I had supposedly sold him a concealed death trap, I “must have known”, the car was effectively a write-off, and the whole thing somehow grew from disclosed MOT advisories into a full-blooded morality play about a sinister seller.
He lost.
The claim was dismissed. No misrepresentation proved. Caveat emptor did what caveat emptor is supposed to do when an adult buys an older car with disclosed advisories and no warranty.
And now, to make the whole farce even uglier for him, the same car he pushed in substance as a write-off has gone on to pass an MOT.
So yes, this is a Rogues Gallery entry. Not because he lost. People lose cases all the time. It is because of how he ran it, what he said, and what the documents would actually bear once the theatre was stripped away. His claim was fully rebutted beforehand. “Nice try pal” he spat back at me. Well, after two round trips to London to serve absolute horse shit to a court, I’ll retort. Nice try, liar. Livingstone advertises himself as a designer. He sure tried to design a coherent claim and failed miserably. To anybody researching him my advice is simply this, be careful. This is a dishonest, and despite showing some intelligence (he can be articulate), he’s not intelligent and will resort to intimidation tactics and vexatious legal action (completely without merit) if he becomes unhappy with his own decisions.
The Pitch Versus The Person
Monkey Nuts Studio’s inclusion branding matters here because Jago himself made it matter. This was not some random punter with no public persona. This was a man who fronts disability-centred consultancy while behaving, in my view, like disability was only respectable when monetised.
In court and in correspondence, the picture was very different from the website gloss.
I am a disabled litigant in person with long-standing anxiety, depression and panic attacks. That was known. It was evidenced. It was not a mystery. Yet time and again my condition was flattened into “stress”, or treated as a tactical inconvenience, or framed in a way that invited the court to see disability-related difficulties as evasiveness.
That may suit a claimant trying to colour a narrative. It does not look much like inclusion.
The Claim: “Excellent For Its Age” Becomes A Fantasy Warranty
The legal case was supposed to be misrepresentation.
That means a claimant has to do something quite boring and quite basic. He has to identify a specific false statement of fact made at the time of sale, show it was false then, prove he relied on it, and show loss flowing from it.
Instead, what Jago really seemed to want was a private-sale warranty by hindsight.
The car was sold with a recent MOT pass. The advisories included general underbody corrosion. Front brake discs were also flagged as worn or pitted but not seriously weakened. Those advisories were disclosed. The description was “excellent for its age”. That is exactly what it looks like: an age-qualified opinion on an older performance car, not a binding promise of virginal metal hidden from time itself.
There was no pre-purchase ramp inspection. No paid expert at the point of sale. No warranty. No dealer obligations. No magic words converting a private sale into a five-month brake guarantee and anti-rust insurance policy.
Months later, after driving the thing, modifying it, servicing it, and generally behaving nothing like a man who believed he’d bought a day-one write-off, Jago wanted the court to retrofit certainty onto speculation.
His refrain was never really “I can prove he knew”.
It was “he must have known”.
That is not proof. It is grievance dressed up as logic.
14 November: Panic Attack, Adjournment Email, Selective Silence
The first hearing should have been the moment where the “inclusive” professional showed some basic decency.
Instead it became one of the grimmest indicators of what was really going on.
In the early hours of 14 November, during a severe panic attack, I emailed the court at 05:56 asking for an adjournment on medical grounds. Jago was copied in.
What happened next was serious enough that the court later recalled the resulting judgment in the interests of fairness.
He emailed the court separately without copying me. He did not tell the judge, when asked about my absence, that I had asked for an adjournment because of a panic attack. The hearing proceeded in my absence. An ex tempore judgment was given.
Only afterwards did the court become aware of the email chain and relist the matter.
You can call that many things. Forgetful. Convenient. Disingenuous. Selectively mute. I know what I call it. What I do know for certain is that a court order exists because that first hearing was not fair.
This is the same man who sells “empathy that lasts”.
Apparently it lasts until the defendant becomes inconvenient.
Dog Sitter, Concert, Panic Attack
The ugliness did not stop there.
When the recalled hearing and disability angle should have prompted some humility, Jago’s written material instead set my panic attacks against his own inconvenience. The line of complaint was not “I’m sorry the court didn’t know”. It was travel plans, dog-sitting arrangements, and a missed concert.
Just sit with that for a moment.
Disabled litigant has panic attack. Court is not properly alerted in the hearing. Judgment later has to be recalled for fairness. Claimant responds, in substance, by foregrounding his own logistics and leisure.
If you wanted a single image for the gap between marketed inclusion and practiced inclusion, you could do worse.
The Evasive Narrative: Hearing, Royal Mail, Employment Tribunal
This was one of the filthiest recurring threads in the case.
Jago repeatedly tried to paint me as evasive.
He did it with the hearing.
He did it with Royal Mail.
He did it with the Employment Tribunal material.
The hearing point is obvious. His silence on 14 November fed exactly the sort of impression he later wanted the court to take from the case.
The Royal Mail point was grubby in a more pedestrian way. He kept trying to suggest I had “refused” delivery. The tracking language did not say that. “No answer” and “not called for” are not the same thing as “refused”, unless words have ceased to matter altogether. But accuracy was never the strong point here. Atmosphere was.
Then came the Employment Tribunal detour. He imported material from unrelated proceedings to tell the small-claims court, in effect, “this is the kind of person you are dealing with”. Different case. Different context. Different forum. A judgment under appeal. One that also recognised disability, which rather spoiled the intended point.
That was not about proving a false statement at the point of sale. It was about poisoning the well.
Unsafe When Convenient, Safe When Expensive
The car story itself bent and flexed whenever it needed to.
At one point the line was that a garage supposedly said in January it was too unsafe to work on. Yet no solid contemporaneous January record appeared to bear the weight Jago wanted it to carry. No urgent MOT fail followed. No DVSA move. No straightforward roadworthiness step that a person genuinely fearing a death trap might be expected to take.
What did happen was continued use.
The car stayed taxed to MOT expiry. It was driven around to get opinions. It ended up at Horsham Developments where more than a thousand pounds went on work including an uprated clutch arrangement and other non-essential or enhanced items.
That matters.
Because the law’s not built to reward someone for driving an allegedly dangerous write-off around the country while simultaneously asking the court to believe he was paralysed by fear of its condition from the start.
Unsafe when it helps the claim. Safe enough when there are upgrades to buy. That was the vibe.
Front, Rear, None: Pick A Subframe, Any Subframe
One of the funniest bits would be the saddest if it had cost me.
Across his own material, the alleged catastrophe could not keep its story straight.
One strand pointed to the front subframe. Another to the rear. Another report managed to mention no subframe issue at all. If you are going to accuse someone of selling hidden structural nastiness, it helps if your own paperwork can at least agree on where the apocalypse lives.
It did not.
That alone should have told any sensible observer what kind of case this really was.
“Structural Filler” And Other Scary-Sounding Fog
Then there was the filler line.
Big scary words. “Structural filler.” Concealment in the air. Suggestion doing heavy lifting. But when it came time to pin down the actual structural component, identify the evidence properly, or show what exactly had been measured and by whom, the substance never quite arrived. “Which structural components?”, I asked.
“I’m not a mechanic”. Brilliant.
That is because body repairs and cosmetic rectification on an older car are not the same thing as some proven hidden structural fraud knowingly concealed by a private seller. An 18-year-old car having had cosmetic work at some point in its life is not remotely shocking. Nor does it prove the seller knew every historical repair on a car he had himself bought years earlier when it was already a decade old.
Again, the gap between insinuation and proof was doing all the work.
The Write-Off That Passed An MOT
This is the part that should follow him around.
He advanced a claim whose emotional force depended heavily on the idea that the car was, in substance, a write-off and would not pass an MOT. That framing helped him posture. It helped him inflate the stakes. It helped him tell the court he had been landed with a hidden ruin.
And yet the car has now passed an MOT.
That does not just sting his narrative. It humiliates it.
No, that does not magically mean every nut and bolt was perfect on the day of sale. That is not the point. The point is that the melodrama was grossly overstated, and the practical, objective world has now handed down a receipt.
A write-off that passes an MOT is not much of a write-off.
Why He Lost
Because the law is, thankfully, duller than his story.
No specific false statement at sale was proved beyond age-qualified puff and disclosed advisories.
No proof showed those statements were false at the time of sale.
His own conduct after purchase was hopeless for reliance.
His claimed losses were wrapped up with later choices, later use, and later theatrics.
Strip away the adjectives and the court was left with a private sale, a disclosed advisory, no pre-purchase inspection, and a claimant trying to turn buyer’s regret plus later opinions into a fraudulent concealment drama.
It did not work.
Rogues Gallery Verdict
So where does Jago Livingstone belong in the TCAP Rogues Gallery?
Not because he lost a case. Losing is ordinary.
Because he sold inclusion and practiced something uglier.
Because he tried to paint a disabled defendant as evasive through silence, spin and imported character material.
Because he inflated an advisory-laden but MOT-passed older car into a courtroom horror story.
Because he called it, in effect, a write-off and then watched it pass an MOT.
Liar?
I know what I think.
But since I am apparently the one meant to be careful with words, let’s put it like this: the documents, the orders and the result do not flatter him. They suggest a man very comfortable saying more than he could prove, and very willing to weaponise disability when it suited him.
For a man in the inclusion trade, that is one hell of a business card.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources (available if required)
- County Court order recalling the first judgment in the interests of fairness
- Final County Court order dismissing the claim
- MOT history showing 27 September 2024 pass with advisories
- Subsequent MOT pass after dismissal of the claim
- Claimant correspondence referring to inconvenience, dog-sitting and a missed concert
- Claimant’s use of unrelated Employment Tribunal material in the small-claims case
- WhatsApp and invoice trail showing continued use, upgrades and shifting defect narrative