Southport race hate wife of Tory councillor claims she was a ‘political prisoner’

Lucy Connolly has claimed she was Sir Keir Starmer’s “political prisoner” after she was jailed for over a year for stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers on the day of the Southport murders.

- NICOLE WOOTTON-CANE

The 42-year-old, from Northampton, said she felt the authorities were determined to “throw the book at her” when she was arrested over a post on X last summer.

The case centred on a post she wrote on the social media platform that said: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care ... if that makes me racist so be it.”

Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor, pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing “threatening or abusive” written material, after her post was viewed 310,000 times. She served 40 per cent of her sentence before being released on Thursday on licence.

Speaking to The Telegraph following her release, she said she believed she had been targeted because her husband was a Conservative councillor. “I’m just a woman from Northampton living in a three-bed semi that worked as a childminder with a husband as an engineer,” she said. “OK, he was a councillor. But that, people forget, that’s almost like a second job.