Lucy Connolly poses no risk to anyone – let her go!
Lucy Connolly should be at home today. Snuggling up with her daughter on the sofa, reassuring the distraught 12-year-old, 'It's OK, Mummy's here now'; reclaiming her kitchen, making dinner for Ray who has stoically held the fort for 10 months but badly misses his wife's steak, egg and chips.
Times are really hard for the Connollys.
So why isn't the 42-year-old Northampton childminder back where she belongs after a 10-month ordeal that began back in July when she posted a horrible tweet on the night of the Southport massacre? The official explanation is that, on Thursday, after several hours of dense legal argument the Court of Appeal decided that it couldn't reach a decision that day and would instead offer a written judgment 'as soon as possible', even though the three judges had all the documentary evidence they needed to make a decision there and then. And further delay meant another weekend in prison for Lucy.
The unofficial explanation was offered by Ray Connolly, who was sitting on the bench next to me in court seven when we heard the devastating news that his wife would not be let out.
'It's terrible, but it's not surprising,' Ray sighed. 'Every time with Lucy there's a delay or some reason why they won't let her have things. Other girls who have done far worse than her, drug dealers, violent women, they get bail, they get let out early, they get ROTL (Release on Temporary Licence) because they need to pay their mortgage or whatever, but Lucy doesn't even get ROTL to be with our daughter.'
Ray, a Conservative county councillor who narrowly lost his seat in the Reform Local Election tsunami, has got used to the fact that the woman he clearly adores became the poster girl for Sir Keir Starmer's crackdown on 'far-Right thuggery' during last summer's riots. To show mercy to Lucy Connolly now would be in some way to admit that the Prime Minister was mistaken and the sentences doled out to protestors were, in many cases, outrageously harsh. Although he was expecting bad news, Ray visibly flinched and reached for my arm when, at around 4.45pm, Lord Justice Holroyde said he knew that the lack of a decision would be 'disappointing' to Mrs Connolly.
Just a bit disappointing, Your Lordship. On her 279th day in captivity, Lucy appeared in court via video-link from HMP Drake Hall in Staffordshire. She wore a floral dress, her brown, shoulder-length hair was nicely blow-dried; she was trying to look as presentable as a weary jailbird could. Ray told me Lucy had been physically sick with nerves the night before, but she presented herself impeccably, giving thoughtful, intelligent answers to her barrister, Adam King KC (a godsend paid for by the Free Speech Union).
She managed to stay calm even when the barrister for the Crown goaded her, saying she was a racist who wanted immigrants to die. While she made no attempt to avoid culpability or downplay her 'disgusting' tweet, Lucy otherwise held her ground, saying that anyone who was human was incredibly upset about the slaughter of three little girls at a Taylor Swift dance club. Her concern, she insisted, was with undocumented young male migrants coming to our country who, yes, did pose a risk to children and women.
'Any time people speak out about immigration you're always 'racist'. It's not racist. I just ignore it now,' she said staunchly. I wanted to cheer in that hushed mausoleum of a courtroom. The system has tried to make Lucy Connolly a sacrificial lamb, but she won't go meekly to the slaughter.
The only time she broke down was when her two children were mentioned. Holly, who will become a teenager in July, was so angry she was being a 'monster' at school, Lucy said, starting to cry. Her decision to plead guilty (a disaster, as it turned out) was so she could be reunited sooner with her previously good-natured, high-achieving daughter. Harry, the Connollys' firstborn, a gorgeous, sunny little boy, died in 2011 aged 19 months following catastrophic failures by the NHS. Lucy and Ray awoke to find Harry's stiff, lifeless body next to them; Lucy was later diagnosed with PTSD.
Ever since, reports of children suffering or dying have sent her into a dark spiral, as they did on July 29 when she tweeted in her rage and her anguish about the horror Axel Rudukabana had unleashed on a roomful of infants. Amazingly, the barrister for the Crown made very little on Thursday of the irrecoverable impact of Harry's tragic death. 'If you've never lost a child, you can't have known what the [Southport victims'] parents were going through. I did,' Lucy told me.
'Mrs Connolly has never trusted authority since Harry's death,' her barrister said, and there she was at the Royal Courts of Justice getting another taste of why 'impartial' authority could not be trusted to do the right or decent thing.
I can't tell you how angry I got in that courtroom. No common sense, no kindness, no forgiveness, no mercy. What a chasm there is between the magnificently-appointed, wood-panelled legal bubble in which those clever men argued back and forth and the real world where the majority of people simply can't believe that one horrible tweet, posted in the heat of the moment and deleted within four hours, gets a woman of previous good character 31 months in jail! If it wasn't for the fact that it would have made things worse for Lucy, I was tempted to stand up and shout at the three elderly judges on their exalted perch, 'WHAT THE HELL'S WRONG WITH YOU? LUCY POSES NO RISK TO ANYONE – LET HER GO!'
The disproportionate, nay, vindictive treatment of Lucy Connolly is fast adding to popular fears about two-tier Keir and a two-tier justice system in which white people seem to them to fare worse than ethnic minorities. (Judge Melbourne Inman, who lectured Lucy Connolly about our diverse and inclusive society before giving her that crazy sentence, was altogether more lenient with a defendant who had posed with a deactivated AK-47 in a video threatening Tommy Robinson, had 11 previous convictions and had been previously jailed for 12 months!)
Is it really an exaggeration to call Lucy a political prisoner in a week when the Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced plans to release prisoners early to free up prison spaces that could involve letting free recalled sex offenders and domestic abusers? I don't think so.
Robert Jenrick, Mahmood's Tory shadow, weighed in on Julia Hartley-Brewer's talk show, asking how could it be right for Lucy to go to prison for such a long time for a single offensive tweet, which she quickly deleted, when 'dangerous people' like a man who had just escaped jail 'despite it being found that he had 12,000 pornographic images on his computer', including a one-year-old being raped? 'I think that offends most people's sense of fairness,' Mr Jenrick said. It certainly does.
Even in legal circles there is disquiet. 'It's the most appalling and unfair case,' a senior magistrate told me at a recent lunch. 'I would be looking for any reasons to avoid giving someone like Lucy a custodial sentence.'
A veteran observer of the criminal justice system draws comparisons: 'I've seen a litany of cases in recent years where a liberal judiciary pats itself on the back for giving truly terrible people the benefit of the doubt and the shortest possible sentences. There is no doubt in my mind that Lucy Connolly was made a scapegoat. She was not even connected with any violence. The fact that, nearly a year later, Appeal Court judges are not accepting the woman needs to get out and be with her innocent young daughter, who is sustaining potentially long-term damage, well, it's unconscionable.'
It is unconscionable that people whom we look to for wisdom, and to apply the law fairly, behave in this flagrantly biased way. 'Modern judges are weak,' explains a famous barrister. 'When we protected them from politics they were amazing. Now, too many are low-grade politicians. To get appointed and to advance their careers they must demonstrate a 'commitment to equality and diversity'. This is how they all got captured – by pursuing self-interest.'
Such woolly, smug liberalism seems increasingly and woefully out of step with the country that the judiciary presides over. Immigration now dominates the headlines, with the vast majority saying they don't want more than 100,000 new arrivals a year. Lucy Connolly's 'bigoted' concerns about migrants posing a threat to children and women are common parlance. Even Sir Keir is suddenly accessing his inner Enoch Powell, warning there's a risk of becoming strangers in our own land. By the PM's own lights, surely that makes him a 'far-Right thug'? If I had to nominate one person who was responsible for the rioting after the Southport mass murder, it wouldn't be Mrs Connolly for a single tweet, it would be Keir Starmer for depriving the public of information about the radicalised killer.
Outside the Royal Courts of Justice, members of the Free Speech Union held a protest, carrying a banner that said: 'Police Our Streets Not Tweets.' The FSU is campaigning to have certain laws repealed so this kind of travesty never happens in future. We should hope that one lasting legacy of the Lucy Connolly case will be a rebalancing of the criminal justice system away from insanely unjust punishment for social media posts in favour of a tough approach to those who actually cause physical harm.
As the August deadline for her release approaches, prison authorities have outrageously warned Lucy that she should not expect to go straight home. Due to 'media interest', they'd rather put her in Approved Premises with key workers first.
'What you have to understand, Allison,' an eminent lawyer told me yesterday, 'is the reason they don't want to free Lucy Connolly is because their worst nightmare is you sitting down for a face-to-face interview with Lucy and everyone realising she's not the racist witch it suited them to paint her as, just a really lovely person.'
You know, I think the public has already decided whose side they're on. Just after those three Appeal Court judges cruelly declined to make a decision, a crowd-funder was set up to help Lucy Connolly rebuild her shattered life – whenever, that is, the injustice system deigns to give Lucy her freedom back.
The total raised in under 24 hours stood at an amazing £24,000. You can help Lucy – and tell Sir Keir what you think about his two-tier justice – by donating too.
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