They tried to break Lucy Connolly, but the decent people of Britain will never desert her
Addressing the issue at a press conference in London, Nigel Farage took the bold step of saying that immigration was to blame for the sharp rise in rapes and sexual assaults in the UK.
Orla, who has been trolled online as a 'Nazi Barbie' and a 'moronic fascist', was disgusted with Essex Police for escorting counter-protesters from Stand Up to Racism (far-Left agitators with placards apparently paid for by the Socialist Workers Party, as the media and authorities don't like to allege) to clash with concerned locals like her. 'If you were in Dover in these numbers, stopping hundreds breaking into our country every day, we wouldn't have this problem,' Orla told officers. One Epping single mother reported an incident involving a migrant to the police and an officer replied: 'Be careful what you say, you know what happened to Lucy Connolly.'
'Outrageous,' says my senior source in Essex Police, 'but a true reflection of the woke culture the chief constable (Ben-Julian Harrington) has spent so much time and money on. Officers aren't taught about free speech in relation to cases like Lucy Connolly's – all they know is hurt feelings.'
The tide is turning fast on that deluded, self-loathing culture, in no small part due to the scandal of Lucy Connolly. Just consider how things have changed:
'If that makes me racist so be it'
Lucy's defiant assertion of her right to criticise the UK's immigration policy is now echoed up and down the land, from pubs to dinner parties. Starmer's Stasi could silence people with the stigma of being racist or 'far-Right' a year ago, but the people have wised up to their tricks. The British will no longer be demonised for defending their women, their children and their culture against illegal migrants. Call us what you like, we are right and they are wrong.
Two-tier Keir
The UK has become a free-speech pariah with Lucy jailed for two-and-a-half years for a thought crime no one has ever linked to actual violence while a (now former) Labour MP Mike Amesbury, who admitted punching a constituent repeatedly, had his laughable 10-week prison sentence suspended within a few short days. Meanwhile, suspended Labour councillor Ricky Jones, captured on video apparently calling for far-Right protesters to have their throats 'cut', only a few days after Lucy's tweet, has been out on bail; his case will not even be heard until later this month. What the hell? Little wonder the Connolly case has made astounded headlines around the world. Last week, Le Monde quoted me on the scandal, saying it had 'brought shame on the UK'. See also the Prime Minister's embarrassment as President Trump schooled him on the way to deal with illegal migrants. An ashen Starmer looks as itchily uncomfortable as a seven-year-old boy with worms. 'You better get your act together or you're not going to have Europe anymore,' Trump warned on his arrival. 'But you're allowing it to happen to your countries and you got to stop this horrible invasion that's happening to Europe. Immigration is killing Europe.' And so say all of Epping!
Misinformation
While ordinary protesters are accused of acting on and spreading 'misinformation', the state is already using (and abusing) the new Online Safety Act to censor public discontent with immigration while denying that posts have wrongly been taken down from X. In fact, since the new rules came into force last week, the platform has blocked users from viewing a clip of MP Katie Lam speaking about grooming gangs in the House of Commons until X has verified their age. So the state is not prepared to protect children against rape, but instead 'protects' adults from hearing about it.
At the weekend, The Telegraph revealed that an elite police unit will monitor social media for signs of 'anti-migrant sentiment'. That's the same state which used a superinjunction to hide from the British people the fact that it had smuggled in thousands of Afghans at a total cost believed to be around £7bn to the taxpayer. And some of those Afghans were Taliban who had fought against British troops, and are now occupying Army quarters next to squaddies' wives and kids. Surely, the most outrageous piece of 'misinformation' in our history. But apparently the real problem is with mothers and fathers who don't want their daughters hissed at and molested on the way to school.
'Take the treacherous government and politicians with them'
Lucy's contempt for politics is nigh on universal now. Successive governments are increasingly viewed as traitors to this country, having ushered in more immigration since 1997 than in all preceding centuries in our history combined. 'Diversity is our strength' rings hollow when foreign-born men are responsible for some 40 per cent of sexual crime against women in London. Opposition to immigration now stands at 75 per cent, which is why Reform UK, the party that is the most trusted opponent of immigration, is at 34 per cent in the polls.
I could go on, and on. It was truly appalling for Lucy Connolly to call for people to set fire to migrant hotels; even if it was a throwaway remark in the heat of the moment, no one could condone it. The burden of her tweet, however, has only gained salience over the past year. As Nigel Farage said, when he insisted that Lucy did not belong in jail: 'Millions of mothers at that moment in time were feeling exactly the same.' They were, and fathers too, and they will no longer keep quiet. The safety of their children may depend on it.
'Lucy will be a national hero when she gets out,' Orla Minihane told me, and that is why our Government fears her. One ordinary woman, a bereaved mother herself, enraged by the massacre of little girls, has acquired a talismanic force because she articulated the furious anguish of millions, and had to be punished for it.
What if Lucy Connolly were to run against Yvette Cooper at the next general election and the patriotic people of West Yorkshire chose to vote to protect British children and showed what they think of a Labour government that is allowing our country to be invaded so there is no Britain anymore? Don't rule it out. We know it now, don't we? This is our last stand.
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The author of the request was 'a baronet and a bachelor' best-known among staff at the British high commission for his 'excellent Sunday curry lunches' and for 'driving round Delhi in a snazzy old Jaguar'. He was also the senior liaison officer for MI5 – the British security service – in the Indian capital, and when the diplomat's wife accepted his offer of employment it was to mark her entry into the shadowy world of intelligence. It was a curiously low-key start for a remarkable 29-year career marked by a series of 'firsts' – culminating in her appointment as the UK's first woman spymaster. In that time she found herself pitted against Russian espionage agents and IRA terrorists as well as, more controversially, domestic 'subversives' including the leaders of the 1984 miners' strike. Dubbed the 'housewife superspy' when she became the first female director general of MI5 – and the first to be named publicly – she did much to bring the service out of the shadows and explain its role to the public. While she struggled with the publicity – she was forced to move out when the press discovered where she lived – she nevertheless appeared delighted when she was credited as the model for Judi Dench's M in the James Bond movies. The greater openness she inaugurated went too far for some when, after leaving, in another first, she became the first former director general to publish her memoir. In retirement she took on a number of non-executive directorships – including for Marks & Spencer, using her surveillance skills to eavesdrop on customers to pick up what they were saying about the company's products. She also drew on her experiences to forge a successful second career as a thriller writer, with a series of novels about the fictional MI5 officer Liz Carlyle. Stella Whitehouse was born on May 13 1935 in South Norwood, a comfortable middle class suburb in south London, the second of two children. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, they moved first to Wallasey and then to Barrow-in-Furness, where her father had taken a job at a steel works. Both towns were hit hard in the Blitz and the nightly bombing raids left her with an acute fear of being trapped in confined spaces that was to last well into adulthood. Only with the end of the war was she able to resume proper schooling, first at the local Croslands Covent School and then at Nottingham High School for Girls after the family moved to the Midlands. After excelling academically, she won a place to read English at Edinburgh University, where in her final year she became friendly again with her future husband, John Rimington, whom she had first met in Nottingham. Following her degree, she took a course in archive administration at Liverpool University, followed by jobs first at the County Record Office in Worcester and then the India Office Library in London. That came to an end in 1965, when her husband, whom she had married two years earlier, was offered a posting as first secretary (economic) in New Delhi and the couple sailed for India. The routine of life as a diplomatic wife soon began to pall, so she jumped at the opportunity of work with MI5, even though it turned out to be mostly clerical and 'not particularly exciting'. Nevertheless, on their return to London in 1969, she decided to seek a permanent job with the service, initially as 'something to keep me interested and amused' until she started a family. The organisation she joined she soon found was a 'land of eccentrics' peopled largely by war veterans and ex-colonial service officers, with a heavy drinking culture. The 'two well-bred ladies of a certain age' who were entrusted with her training would each day at noon produce a pair of glasses and a bottle of sherry for a 'rather elegant pre-lunch drink'. It was also a service with a 'strict sex discrimination' policy with women confined to administrative and support roles while the frontline work – such as recruiting and running agents – was for men only. Her early assignments including helping to identify potential communist infiltrators in rural Sussex and working on the newly formed Northern Ireland desk set up in response to the start of the Troubles. After becoming pregnant with the first of her two daughters, Sophie, she found her determination to return to work after the child was born was met with 'incomprehension' within the service. She was not particularly enthusiastic herself, but needed the money, although matters improved when she was given the chance to work on the 'main enemy' – the Soviet Union. The defections of the Cambridge spies – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – still cast a long shadow over the intelligence community, fuelled in part by the conspiracy theories of MI5 officer Peter Wright who was convinced there was another Russian mole within the organisation. Mrs Rimington was tasked with re-interviewing John Cairncross – later identified as the so-called 'fifth man' in the group – who had made a partial confession to spying in the 1960s, but failed to extract any new leads from him. Nevertheless, her persistence paid off when she finally persuaded her bosses to make her a full MI5 officer, after complaining that male graduates recruited straight from university were being brought in over her head. A further breakthrough followed when it was agreed she could train as an agent-runner, the view having long been taken that potential informants would be unwilling to talk to a woman. In her memoir she recalled the difficulties of juggling her new role, which frequently involved going under cover, with bringing up a young family. On one occasion she received a call from a nanny to say her younger daughter had been taken to hospital with convulsions just as she was preparing for a crucial rendezvous with a potential defector. In the event she managed to make it to the meet, after first checking in at the hospital, but had to borrow money from the would-be defector to pay for all the taxis involved. 'Whether the apparent scarcity of funds available to British intelligence influenced his decision or not, I don't know,' she wrote. 'But he did eventually decide not to make the jump across.' Nevertheless, her career was by this stage firmly on an upward trajectory and in 1983 she was appointed an assistant director – the first woman to hold the post – with responsibility for counter-subversion. Initially, she thought it was something of a backwater but that quickly changed with the advent of the miners' strike the following year. She later recalled 'agonising' over whether it was legitimate for MI5 to monitor Arthur Scargill and other union leaders – finally concluding that they should as Mr Scargill had declared his aim was to bring down the government of Margaret Thatcher. When MI5's involvement became known it nevertheless proved highly controversial, leading to claims it had engaged in a 'dirty tricks' campaign against the miners, which Mrs Rimington always denied. Promotion, to director of counter-espionage, saw her embroiled in further controversy when Peter Wright – by now retired and thoroughly embittered – published his notorious Spycatcher memoir. It included his now long-discredited theory that former director general Roger Hollis had been a Russian spy as well as a startling claim that a group of MI5 officers – himself among them – had tried to bring down Labour prime minister Harold Wilson. Although Wright later withdrew the allegations, his description of how MI5 had 'bugged and burgled' their way across London led to demands that the service should be brought more firmly under ministerial control with its surveillance powers set on a statutory footing. At first Mrs Rimington was reluctant, producing an internal policy paper arguing against legislation, but after accepting that change was inevitable she became an enthusiastic proponent, sitting on a joint working group with the Home Office which drew up the landmark Security Service Act. By now both the service she had first joined in the 1960s and the threats it faced were very different. With the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991 she led a three-strong delegation to Moscow in an extraordinary attempt to establish friendly relations with their erstwhile adversaries in the KGB. Despite a warm welcome, with a visit to the Bolshoi Ballet and with much champagne flowing, when she suggested to the Russians they might cut back their espionage in the UK as a prelude to greater co-operation on issues such as counter-terrorism, the idea was dismissed as 'ridiculous'. Any disappointment was short-lived. On her return to London she was greeted with news that she was to be the next director general, despite not having been interviewed for the post, or even asked whether she wanted it. Furthermore, John Major's government had decided that now the service was on a statutory footing, thanks to the legislation she helped draw up, her appointment should be announced publicly – the first time any British intelligence chief had been openly identified. The announcement – in a brief, two-line statement with no accompanying photograph – caused a media sensation, not least because she was the first woman to head any of the agencies, for which she was ill-prepared. Her elder daughter, Sophie, was away at university and only learned the news from the television, while their home was soon surrounded by journalists. In the absence of any official photograph, a blurry snatch shot taken some years earlier was widely circulated, before photographers finally managed to capture a rather unflattering image of her leaving the house. Amid all the furore, it soon became apparent that she could not carry on living there, and she was forced to move into secure accommodation with her younger daughter (she had separated from her husband some years earlier). Despite such an inauspicious start, Mrs Rimington used her time as director general to bring gradually bring the service out of the shadows, dispelling some of the myths and misconceptions built up around it. In 1993, MI5 published a short booklet which, for the first time, put some facts into the public domain, while she appeared alongside then home secretary Michael Howard in an official photocall to launch it. A further step towards greater openness followed when, despite much official hand-wringing, she was given permission to deliver the prestigious BBC Dimbleby lecture on the role of the security services in a democracy. She was made a dame in the 1996 New Year's Honours list. Her heightened public profile led to sniping in Whitehall that 'Stella likes the limelight' – a perception only enhanced when, five years after her retirement in 1996, she chose to publish her memoir, to the fury of many of her former colleagues. Such criticisms did not stop her speaking out in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the US 'war on terror' to warn that draconian new laws simply played into the hands of the terrorists by spreading fear and alarm. Alongside her post-MI5 writing and business commitments she even found time to chair the judging panel for the Man Booker Prize for literature, although her comment that they were looking for 'readability' found her once again in the firing line from critics who accused her of 'dumbing down' the award. During the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, she reconciled with her husband, moving in together during lockdown. 'It's a good recipe for marriage, I'd say,' she said. 'Split up, live separately, and return to it later.'
