Finally we have the proof that Lucy Connolly was stitched up
"[She] had been made an example of by a British state that was increasingly nervous that people no longer accepted its narrative on multiculturalism – “Diversity is our strength!”.
So terrified was the criminal justice system by the threat of social unrest it was determined to clamp down on anyone who dared challenge it...
Diagnosed with PTSD after Harry’s death, she was easily triggered by any report of children suffering...
The fact that Axel Rudakubana was originally said by the media to be a Cardiff-born “quiet choir boy” angered Lucy, as did the insistence by police and MPs that the attack was not “terror related”, despite the targets being young Western girls enjoying moving their bodies to “decadent” pop music (not unlike the jihadist attack on the Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena which I have always attributed to Islamist misogyny), the discovery (we later learnt) of an al-Qaeda training manual on Rudakubana’s computer, and the presence of enough ricin under his bed to poison everyone in his street...
It was reported by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that Mrs Connolly had told police she “did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them”. She said nothing of the sort, but by the time the CPS admitted it the damage was done. Within hours, she was all over the media as “Tory councillor’s racist wife”.
Lucy was denied bail, although as a first-time offender with a blameless record she was the perfect candidate for it. With remarkable speed, her case was rushed through. Lucy was held on remand in prison and was persuaded by a duty solicitor that “going guilty” was her best option if she wanted to be home in time for Christmas with her 12-year-old daughter.
Such a case might be expected to be heard in a magistrates’ court – I was told by one horrified magistrate that she would be “looking for any reason not to jail someone like Lucy” – but a magistrate could not have given Lucy a long sentence, something we could speculate the state was rather keen on in the aftermath of the Southport “riots”.
The Connollys were shocked when the judge at Birmingham Crown Court delivered a lecture on what a diverse and tolerant nation the UK was and then, apparently ignoring all the mitigating factors and the powerful testimonials from ethnic-minority parents, sentenced Lucy to a shocking 31 months in jail.
I was deeply suspicious about Lucy Connolly’s case. Ray Connolly was almost as demonised as Lucy for insisting on Sky News “my wife is not a racist”. I believed him. After my own brush with police over a long-deleted tweet, I began to talk to Lucy in prison, and heard how she was being denied the normal leave granted even to hardcore offenders. I came to the chilling conclusion she was effectively a political prisoner.
After I wrote about Lucy, her story was picked up around the world, contributing to a growing alarm that Britain – ironically led by “human rights” lawyer Sir Keir Starmer – was exercising censorship of our ancient free-speech rights.
Much of this was surmise and not easy to prove. Questioned about the case, the Prime Minister said he had no knowledge of it. Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, was said not to have been involved in the sentencing of Mrs Connolly and others arrested in connection with the Southport riots. When Lucy applied to the CPS for her files, they said they didn’t have them.
Like many things Lucy was told, that wasn’t true. She put in a SAR (Subject Access Request) and this week was finally sent all the relevant documents. Some of what they contain is utterly damning – not of Lucy but of the criminal justice system that was clearly in a hurry to punish her as harshly as possible.
Lucy was charged on the night of August 9. By 9.45am the following day – a Saturday, when good lawyers are hard to find – the CPS had got confirmation that Lord Hermer had signed off the prosecution. Up early, was he? Emails said the case had gone through as an “emergency prosecution”, what one senior barrister described to me as “almost certainly unlawful”.
“They have to prove it’s an emergency – and it clearly isn’t,” he said. “What is it they’re trying to prevent? Mrs Connolly had already deleted her tweet. Saying it’s an emergency prosecution is clearly political.”
On email, the CPS continued: “There is evidence of other racist tweets sent on L.C’s account. Both before and after the particular tweet. This demonstrates that this was not a one-off regrettable tweet but part of her dislike for immigrants and a desire for…” [The final word of the sentence is redacted.]
Not true. “No further racist tweets were found on my phone or my Twitter account,” Lucy says. “This is confirmed by Northamptonshire Police in a reply to a complaint I made against them. There is one charge for one tweet on the indictment.” If the police or CPS claimed there were other racist tweets then they “misled the court,” says the barrister, “which is very serious.”
Astonishingly, district judges had been informed about “these cases” (linked to Southport presumably) and were told they must be put in “the next available slots”. Who was telling them that? Surely, it was the Ministry of Justice or even the Attorney General himself. “Unconstitutional” is what the barrister calls it.
Reasons cited for denying Lucy bail twice are “obviously unlawful”, he says. She didn’t need “protection” as she could be safe at home with her family. Also, there was no danger of a repeat offence, as the documents claim. “Police could have taken away her phone and her computer. Again, it looks like a political decision.”
The documents record that, on August 22, Lucy’s solicitor attended her second bail hearing (the first request had been refused). The hearing lasted two minutes. Just long enough to read out Lucy’s name, date of birth and address. “The decision had already been made,” Lucy tells me. “They clearly weren’t prepared to listen to any of my mitigating factors because how could they in such a short amount of time?” Either her solicitor didn’t offer a defence, or he wasn’t allowed to.
The courts were also told that charges and sentencing should reflect the “seriousness” with which Parliament “has approached the issue of racial hostility”. What has Parliament got to do with it? Isn’t the judiciary supposed to be independent?
As Lucy’s was a first offence she could have been fined and her case heard in a magistrates’ court. But, in the documents, the CPS reveals that they’ve been told that people (involved in Southport) are going to get custodial sentences of more than 12 months. Judges have been told that they will have to award a certain sentence. “They have a Sentencing Council which they claim is independent,” says the barrister. “Specifying what the sentence should be is definitely political interference.”
The documents also reference Frank Ferguson, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division, who said in a statement issued after Lucy pleaded guilty on September 2: “During police interview, Lucy Connolly stated she had strong views on immigration, told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them.”
“This was not what was said,” according to Lucy. “Police interviews confirm I did not say I did not like immigrants. I said I was concerned about undocumented men arriving in the UK illegally and we don’t know what they’ve done or where they’re from. This was later corrected by the CPS to reflect what I’d actually said.”
None of the above is particularly surprising to be honest, although I still find it shocking. “It just confirms everything we suspected,” says Lucy. “I’m just surprised they were prepared to put it down in black and white.”
With Starmer and Hermer preparing to restrict trial by jury, there seems no let-up in the authoritarian crackdown on “hate speech” (very often just telling the truth) that saw Lucy Connolly cruelly and absurdly spend more than a year away from her child. The same criminal justice system which gives insanely lenient sentences to foreign rapists did, in effect, put on a show trial for a white, working-class mum of previously good character who called out an asylum system which poses a growing danger to women and girls.
Well, it backfired. Lucy’s case became notorious. Once her draconian release conditions are lifted in a year’s time, and she can travel abroad, she has an open invitation to go and speak at the White House about the way she was fitted up to act as a deterrent to others who feel inclined to criticise what Lucy rightly called “treacherous government and politicians” who have lost control of our borders.
The Trump administration makes no secret of the fact that it regards Starmer’s Britain as a free-speech basket case and, in fact, Graham Linehan, the comedian, gave evidence to Congress today, about his arrest at Heathrow Airport by five armed officers last September for tweets he sent about the transgender debate.
Should the Prime Minister still be in a job, which I very much doubt, he should brace himself to be deeply embarrassed by the formidable Mrs Connolly.
