Hardened criminals come in many shapes and sizes. But, on the face of it, Lucy Connolly appears very far removed from anybody’s idea of a thuggish jailbird.
Until recently, the 42-year-old childminder lived a pretty unremarkable life. Each morning, toddlers would be dropped off in her charge at her pleasant 1930s semi on a tree-lined avenue in a Northampton suburb and she would watch over them as they played in the garden.
Married to a Conservative member of West Northamptonshire Council, and doting on their 12-year-old daughter – a keen golfer – she would also enjoy walks with their dog, Harley, a German pointer.
As you may know, all that changed when, last August, in a moment of madness, this seemingly mild-mannered mother-of-one posted on X (formerly known as Twitter), in the aftermath of the sickening murders of children in Southport, Merseyside, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.
In an undoubtedly vile missive, targeted at illegal migrants after false information spread in the wake of the murders that killer Axel Rudakubana was in the country illegally – he was in fact born in Cardiff to parents from Rwanda – she said that people should ‘set fire to all the f*****g hotels full of the b******s for all I care’.
An abhorrent sentiment? Clearly. Racist? Definitely. Indeed, Connolly pleaded guilty to publishing threatening or abusive material intending to stir up racial hatred.
In 2011, Lucy Connolly lost her 19-month-old son, Harry. He was found lifeless in bed after his was sent home from hospital. He died of dehydration and acute kidney failure after suffering from an inflammation of the colon, which had not been detected
At Birmingham Crown Court in October, she was jailed for two years and seven months after Judge Melbourne Inman KC drew a direct link between her post and the mindless violence which subsequently engulfed Britain in the wake of the Southport murders last summer, which saw hotels housing asylum seekers targeted.
But the length of her sentence, which has seen her locked up alongside career crooks, has drawn bitter criticism from former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, as well as a raft of free speech advocates for being unduly harsh. Even Elon Musk, who is advising President Donald Trump, has waded in.
It has been held up as an example of ‘two-tier policing’, with suggestions abounding that the white working-class and those on the Right-wing are dealt with more harshly than others.
On Tuesday Connolly’s case again attracted headlines when the Court of Appeal dismissed her bid to overturn her 31-month sentence. Connolly told the court she ‘never’ intended to incite violence and did not realise pleading guilty would mean she accepted that she had. She said the reference to burning hotels was a ‘flippant remark’.
As her supporters demonstrated outside London’s Royal Courts of Justice during the hearing, Connolly, via video-link from prison, said she was ‘really angry’ after the Southport attacks, but hours after posting her rant on X realised it was not an acceptable thing to say, so deleted it.
Dismissing her appeal, Lord Justice Holroyde described Connolly’s evidence to the court as ‘incredible’ and said the three senior judges deciding her fate were ‘unable to accept’ she had pleaded guilty without realising the offence attracted a starting point of three years in custody.
The sentence was not ‘manifestly excessive,’ they concluded. During her incarceration she has reportedly even been denied temporary release from prison – to which she is eligible – to spend time with her young daughter and husband, who is suffering from bone marrow failure. Prison bosses are said to have feared the publicity that even a short spell of freedom could attract.
However, Professor Ian Acheson, a former prison governor and Government adviser on extremism in prisons, told the Mail it was ‘inexplicable’ her release on temporary licence had been delayed.
In an undoubtedly vile missive, targeted at illegal migrants after false information spread in the wake of the murders that killer Axel Rudakubana (pictured) was in the country illegally – he was in fact born in Cardiff to parents from Rwanda – Lucy said that people should ‘set fire to all the f*****g hotels full of the b******s for all I care’
‘In my opinion, the tweet was racist,’ he said. ‘It was malignant and dangerous. However, I think she has been exceptionally hard done by. She has complied with her sentence, so why is she being delayed for temporary release?
‘There is no evidence she poses further risk. It isn’t her fault [that there is media interest in the case] and shouldn’t be relevant anyway. It feels to me a little bit like someone has their thumb on the scales here.’
Prof Acheson said such treatment does little to dispel allegations of ‘two-tier justice’. ‘People will draw conclusions, not unreasonable conclusions, that we have a justice system that will hit low-hanging fruit but will shy away from the more difficult identity-connected offences,’ he said.
‘If you look at far-Right and neo-Fascist groups, that narrative is being talked up and we are providing more ammunition for that.
‘White working-class Britain is being radicalised by what they perceive is behind decision-making in the criminal justice system. This is truly dangerous for community cohesion. The Government must address this trust deficit, not simply traduce it as ignorance or bigotry.’
So should this suburban childminder really remain behind bars? And what possible risk to the public could she represent?
After all, neighbours in her Northampton street have sung her and her family’s praises, while a friend of Connolly’s told the Mail that she was ‘loved’ by the children in her charge. Crucially, the family were also well-known to have had their comfortable suburban life pierced by tragedy.
In 2011, they lost their 19-month-old son, Harry. He was found lifeless in bed after they were sent home from Northampton General Hospital, later prompting a fulsome apology after a coroner identified failings in his care. He died of dehydration and acute kidney failure after suffering from an inflammation of the colon, which had not been detected.
Connolly was left with PTSD. Not wishing for his death to be in vain, she helped to set up a charity, Mother’s Instinct, which campaigned for clinicians to listen more carefully to parents’ fears over the health of their children.
In an interview with the Mail in 2013 in the wake of Harry’s death, Connolly said: ‘I will never know how you can take a child to the doctor and they die of something so unnecessary. I feel we were not listened to. Again and again, we begged the doctors and nurses to do something. But they never did.’
Lucy is married to Tory councillor for West Northamptonshire Council Raymond Connolly
It is against this backdrop, as the three Court of Appeal judges noted this week, that Connolly developed a ‘deep mistrust of anyone who might be regarded as a person in authority telling her what to do or what to believe’.
This seemingly fed into her online persona. By July of last year, it was clear that there were two sides to her. One was the pleasant brunette, the ‘councillor’s wife’. The other was ‘Lucie’. Using a slightly alternated spelling of her real name, Connolly was posting regularly to more than 9,000 followers on X.
In fact, it would appear that she had become somewhat obsessed. Analysis by the Mail found that between December 2023 and August last year she was posting an average of 100 tweets every day – most of them diatribes attacking immigrants, the Labour government, Islam or ‘thick’ people she referred to by a word unprintable in a family newspaper. She hit out at Channel migrants, who she called ‘illegal boat invaders’, saying they were ‘mostly criminals from third world countries’.
After a pleasant holiday in Romania, she told her followers that one of the main benefits was that it was ‘not full of illegals’.
Unwise and unpalatable as these comments may be, her fears of ‘unvetted criminals’, as she put it, arriving illegally in Britain, are no doubt echoed by many among the electorate but not shared so publicly and in such coarse language.
Where she overstepped the mark, according to Frank Ferguson of the Crown Prosecution Service, is directly calling for violence. Which takes us back to the offending post. On July 29 last year, Rudakubana stabbed 13 people in Southport, including eight children. Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice Da Silva Aguiar, nine, died following the attack.
False rumours swirled that he was an illegal migrant. Into this maelstrom, ‘Lucie’ posted: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f*****g hotels full of the b*****s for all 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 so be it.’
As we now know – but unbeknown to Connolly at the time of her post – angry men across the country would indeed attempt to take the law into their own hands.
Realising her hot-headedness after she calmed down while out walking the family dog that evening, Connolly deleted her post within four hours. But by that time it had already been viewed 310,000 times.
In the riots which followed the Southport murders, hotels housing asylum seekers were targeted by arsonists. Police were attacked. Migrants were vilified in the streets. Realising that she may face punishment for her comments, Connolly told friends that ‘the raging tweet about burning down hotels has bit me on the arse lol [laugh out loud]’ and said she would ‘play the mental health card’ if arrested.
The Court of Appeal heard that she published an apology on X and later deleted her account ‘for her husband’s sake’. When arrested and interviewed under caution she told police how her own child had died in horrendous circumstances ‘and that the stabbings of the children in Southport had put her into a rage’. She said she had no intention of causing hate or racial issues and ‘felt hatred about the incident and the circumstances, not about race.’
On August 12 last year – two weeks after her original post – Connolly appeared at Northampton Crown Court. Despite having no previous convictions, she was denied bail and remanded in custody. In October, she received that lengthy prison sentence.
Judge Inman noted that sentences for those who incite racial hatred are intended to both ‘punish and deter’.
Connolly’s supporters, including the Free Speech Union, argue that – as a woman with significant mitigating factors including the lack of previous convictions, a young daughter at home and the death of her baby son – Connolly’s 285 days in custody already represent punishment enough.
Adelle Healy, 42, who has been friends with Connolly for nine years, told the Mail: ‘Lucy was horrified and heartbroken that three little girls had been murdered. She let her emotions take over and wrote something that she definitely shouldn’t have done but she has paid a very dear price.
‘She should not be behind bars for a tweet. I think it’s ludicrous that it’s got to this point.’
Ms Healy, who works for a car insurance company, added: ‘Lucy has forthright opinions and sometimes they can upset people but a lot of her anger is aimed at the Government, particularly with unvetted immigration.
‘She was worried about the large number of people arriving in Britain without any background checks. She believes they could pose a threat to national security and a risk to children.
‘As a childminder… all the kids loved her – no matter their background – because she was just so caring and gave a lot back.’
Lisa Pitcher, 53, a neighbour in Northampton, said: ‘Lucy should never have been put inside – not when you have rapists out on bail – and the fact she’s been denied temporary leave is disgusting. She should never have tweeted what she did. She knew that, which is why she deleted it four hours later.
‘I think she reacted with uncontrolled anger when those three little girls were murdered because it brought back awful memories. She knows the pain and heartache of losing a child.’
Ms Pitcher added: ‘I think her case shames the British judicial system and I think it is political.’ To emphasise her point, she referenced the recent case of former Labour MP Mike Amesbury, who received a ten-week sentence for assault after he punched a constituent, later downgraded to a suspended sentence following an appeal. ‘He actually physically assaulted someone – he did real harm. But it’s one rule for one and one for another,’ she claimed.
Indeed, the most obvious criticism levelled at the length of Connolly’s sentence is the apparent disparity between her punitive treatment and lesser sentences handed to, on the face of it, more serious offenders.
Sentencing her, Judge Inman drew that link between her post and the mindless violence which engulfed Britain last summer.
However a month before Connolly’s sentence, the same judge sentenced a teenager who attempted to storm a pub he wrongly believed to contain members of a far-Right group to 20 months – significantly less than Connolly’s sentence.
Raymond Connolly outside the Royal Courts of Justice as his wife appealed her sentence, with supporters including journalists Allison Pearson and Dan Wootton, and Toby Young, founder and director of the Free Speech Union
Terrified customers barricaded themselves inside the Clumsy Swan pub in the Yardley area of Birmingham as Haris Ghaffar, 19, and others wearing balaclavas and carrying knives, tried to get inside, believing that it was housing members of the English Defence League [EDL]. Ghaffar pleaded guilty to violent disorder.
Similarly, in August, David Engleby, 29, was jailed for two years and four months for taking part in a riot close to Southport’s mosque the day after the murders of the little girls. Video played at Liverpool Crown Court showed Engleby and two others, who also received lesser sentences than Connolly, throwing missiles at police and chanting anti-Islamic slogans.
Or take the Irish rap trio Kneecap, who have been defended by dozens of high-profile artists after footage emerged from a gig in 2023 when they told the crowd to ‘kill your local MP’. Videos have also captured the group shouting ‘up Hamas, up Hezbollah’. Counter-terrorism police from the Metropolitan Police are investigating.
Some legal experts, however, have claimed Connolly’s sentence was just in the circumstances.
One eminent professional said: ‘It is at the top end of what she might have expected but if you send out tweets calling for hotels to be burned down that is quite serious incitement [to violence].’
Connolly is now at a low ebb. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph this week, she said the Court of Appeal judges should be ‘ashamed of themselves’. ‘Absolute rotten b******s, rotten, dictating b*****d judges,’ she said.
‘They’re keeping me away from my child. It’s three more months without her and her without me.’
She added: ‘Whatever you think of what I did, I think ten-and-a-half months inside is long enough.’
There are contradictions in the case of Lucy Connolly – but there is no doubt many would agree.
Additional reporting: JAMES FIELDING
