Lucy Connolly despairs of her country. ‘I don’t think this is the Britain most sane people want, is it?’ she says. ‘Everybody’s just living in fear of what they can and can’t say and what’s going to happen next.’
Indeed. Just over two weeks ago, Lucy was told that the school her 13-year-old daughter Edie was expecting to join last Monday had withdrawn her place. Edie spent the weekend crying in her room.
‘Edie needed a fresh start. We’d been to the school and it all seemed to be agreed,’ says Lucy. ‘She was really excited but, on the Thursday, I got a call from Edie’s current school saying the new school had withdrawn her place because, in a nutshell, it seems likely they found out who I was.
‘They said that racism doesn’t go down well in their school and, if the other parents found out who Edie’s parents were, there might be some kind of ruckus. I fired off a complaint saying they shouldn’t be bringing woke politics into school.’
This is not the only letter Lucy, a 42-year-old childminder, has written since she was released from prison in August after serving 377 days of a grotesquely excessive 31-month sentence for inciting racial hatred with an ill-judged – and, admittedly, vile – post she uploaded to X on the day three little girls were stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport.
Wrongly believing, like many, that the perpetrator was an illegal immigrant, ‘the red mist descended,’ she says now.
‘I was so upset, so angry and shaking with rage. Obviously, I’m here with the children [she looks after] thinking about them and Edie. She had gymnastics that Thursday. Was I going to send her there and some nutter was going to go in and stab all the children?’
Lucy, who lost her 19-month-old son because of hospital negligence in 2011, confesses that she suffers with terrible anxiety about her daughter.
Lucy Connolly with her daughter, Edie, who has been affected by her mother’s jail sentence
Ms Connolly and husband Raymond. She posted on social media after the Southport attack
Riot police on duty during the Southport riots, which followed the murders of three schoolgirls
And those feelings helped inform that message she posted on social media in July 2024.
It read: ‘Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all that I care. While you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, then so be it.’
A few hours later, after taking the family’s dog for a walk, she deleted the tweet because ‘I’d calmed down and thought, “Gosh, you can’t write that.” It was not nice. I knew I shouldn’t have sent it.’ She then forgot about it until a screenshot was shared on social media eight days later. It went viral.
And Lucy, who is married to Ray, an engineer and also a Conservative local councillor, says that is when the ‘witch hunt’ began.
‘Left-wing activists started tagging Ray, saying, “She’s a Tory councillor’s wife. We’re going to report you to the police.”’
As social unrest over the Southport stabbings swept the country, Lucy was arrested at home on August 6. After questioning, she was released on bail without charge on the condition she didn’t post on social media.
But that was far from the end of the matter.
The BBC named her, along with the fact she was married to a Tory councillor, in an online news story, despite guidance recommending suspects are not named before being charged. And three days later, in the week Sir Keir Starmer vowed rioters and those ‘whipping up violence online’ would ‘feel the full force of the law’, she was arrested again and this time charged.
Little wonder Lucy feels it was ‘very politically motivated’.
‘Not that I’m blaming Ray,’ she says, ‘but if he hadn’t held the position he held, I don’t think they’d have been so harsh on me.
‘I believe Starmer was trying to take the heat off himself. We now know that monster [in Southport] was known to the police, the Government counter-extremism [officers] and Prevent. I believe Starmer knew that wouldn’t go down well so he just made it about everybody else.
‘I’ve done the research and there isn’t one single BBC article online where they have not referred to me as “Tory councillor’s wife Lucy Connolly”. We joke saying I’m going to get a private number plate that says TCW – Tory councillor’s wife.’
Yet despite all this, Lucy, speaking from the family’s immaculate three-bedroom semi, has received more supportive emails and letters in the past year than she can count. Some are from the Bangladeshi, Lithuanian and Afghan communities whose children she has cared for in her home.
Ray tells me councillors from the town’s ethnic communities crossed the council chamber’s floor to offer their support while white members from the Labour Party called for his resignation.
But the repercussions were perhaps hardest for Edie.
She was beside herself when her mother, who in the words of Reform’s Nigel Farage stands as ‘a symbol of Keir Starmer’s authoritarian, broken, two-tier Britain’, was kept in prison for more than 12 months without being allowed a single day release to spend with her child. The prison governor, who blocked every request, blamed media interest.
‘When my probation officer was told, she was furious,’ Lucy recalls. ‘The probation officer knew from Edie’s teachers that she was suffering. Edie, like most teenagers, is not good at talking about her emotions, so anger became her default. She got really argumentative with the teachers and started getting suspended. She’d never been suspended before.
‘That was the worst part of being in prison – feeling so helpless. When your family’s going through stuff, Ray’s struggling at home, Edie’s struggling at school and there’s absolutely nothing you can do, it’s a horrible feeling.’
Ray suffers from aplastic anaemia – a rare and serious condition where the bone marrow stops making enough new blood cells. It is treated with immunotherapy.
Thankfully, the Connollys belong to a loving family who stepped in to help, but it’s a miracle Ray managed to hold everything together at all.
‘I was absolutely petrified when I got to Peterborough [prison],’ says Lucy. ‘They were telling me I could be looking at seven years. I was sitting there crying and thinking, “Edie is going to be 19 and the dog will be dead. I can’t stay in here.”’
Those thoughts led Lucy, on the advice of her lawyers, to plead guilty to inciting racial hatred in September last year. She imagined, she now knows naively, she’d be home by Christmas.
‘Had I pleaded not guilty, I felt like my case had been so prejudiced by the likes of the BBC and anyone else who puts across the Government’s narrative, that I’d probably still be sitting there waiting for a court date. So much had been reported that just wasn’t true.’
Indeed, just a month ago Lucy received a letter from Northamptonshire Police confirming the shocking lies released by the Crown Prosecution Service that influenced her case.
As Lucy says: ‘They threw the CPS under the bus.’ Take the accusation, made by the CPS in a press release after Lucy’s sentencing, that she had admitted to police she didn’t like immigrants in general, as opposed to illegal immigrants.
The letter from Northamptonshire Police’s Professional Standards Department states: ‘It is apparent from the interview recordings that you were very clear that you had strong views around illegal immigration as opposed to migrants in general. Therefore, any press release that did state you didn’t like “immigrants” as opposed to “illegal immigrants” would be a misrepresentation of what was said.’
It continues: ‘This is a very important distinction, as a dislike of immigrants in general would likely be held as expressing racial prejudice, however, disliking those that have entered the country illegally due to their criminality would not.’
The department also found Northants Police had not released any information identifying her following her arrest that ‘could be considered prejudicial to any court proceedings or impacted on fairness’. It was the BBC which took it upon itself to name her. Similarly, the standards department confirmed that, contrary to reports in the CPS press release that numerous additional racist tweets were recovered from Lucy’s phone, ‘no reference was ever made by Northants Police indicating that there were further “racist tweets” other than the one that was central to the case’.
In fact, the department noted, there was only one post found on her X account in the original investigation displaying ‘racial prejudice’ which was when she used the term ‘pikey’. The letter admonished her for that post because the ‘pejorative term’ applied to members of the travelling or Roma communities and was ‘clearly being used in an insulting manner’.
But Lucy shakes her head. ‘I wasn’t actually calling a traveller a pikey,’ she explains. ‘It was just banter with a friend about his holiday caravan.
‘Other than that, there were no other racist tweets as the likes of the BBC were reporting. The CPS has screwed me over, and I’m taking that up with them.’
When Lucy was eventually sentenced to 31 months she was, she says, ‘a wreck’.
‘Then something in me just went, “Pull yourself together. You’ve got to do this sentence and it’s not helping anyone sitting here sobbing all the time.”’
The ‘worst part’ was being told she could not spend a day out with Edie before Christmas.
‘Ray came to see me with her on Christmas Eve. I knew I’d have to try to hold it together. She kept saying, “Mummy, can’t you come home? How am I going to show you my presents?”
‘How are you supposed to answer that? Saying goodbye to her was horrible.
‘On Christmas Day, Ray put me on loudspeaker so I could hear her opening her presents.
‘She was telling me what she’d got, which was quite cute but really awful too.’
Ray describes how, shortly before Edie’s 13th birthday in July, the family again requested Lucy be given day release, with supporting letters from Edie’s teachers saying how concerned they were for her and how she needed to spend time with her mother.
Letters also made clear how Ray was struggling with his condition.
‘The day before her birthday I bumped into an employee at the prison who told me they’d done everything they could for us, but that the governor had a meeting with the Home Secretary on Zoom,’ Ray says. ‘It was Yvette Cooper at the time.’
The family don’t know why their request was blocked. ‘The prison system is supposed to be independent,’ adds Lucy. ‘They’ve denied there was a meeting with the Home Secretary regarding me since, but…’ Her face darkens.
‘When you’re nearing the end of your sentence, everybody who is low risk is entitled to what they call “resettlement day release” for the last two or three months. I didn’t even get those.’
It was August 21 before Lucy was finally released, emerging as something of a figurehead for battalions of concerned parents who protested outside migrant hotels against an influx of undocumented males being billeted in their communities.
Today she still ‘lives in fear’ of being sent back to prison because she must remain on probation until March 2027.
The terms of her licence are the most stringent, usually reserved for terrorists and sex offenders, while Left-wing activists are forever reporting her to the probation service alleging all sorts of nonsense about infringements. She refuses to be cowed.
‘When I first got to prison I was so upset about how I was being portrayed by the likes of the BBC. I remember ringing up my mum sobbing, saying, “I don’t want to walk down the street with people going, ‘There’s that racist.’ ” Now I’ve hardened up.
‘I’m not a racist. I don’t think I was guilty of inciting violence or racial hatred. That wasn’t my intention and I made that clear from the start. I wasn’t talking about race or religion.
‘What I posted was to do with illegal immigration and I don’t renounce my views. I really think it’s unsafe for our children to have thousands of unchecked people roaming the streets.
‘I won’t be bullied. So many people are worried about what they can and can’t say, what they can and can’t post.
‘You shouldn’t have to live in fear. Free speech is a big part of the UK. People fought for it and we need to stand up for it. I intend to.’
Right now, though, her focus is Edie. ‘She has been through a lot so we’re playing the softly, softly approach. She didn’t have a mummy for a year, so this has been massive for her.
‘I know if that had happened to me when I was her age, I’d have been heartbroken.
‘Now, a school seems to be discriminating against a vulnerable child because they don’t like what their mother has said or done. I won’t let it go. It’s insane.’
‘You know what?’ she adds. ‘I still can’t get my head around the fact that some people are angrier about what I wrote than about those children dying.’
