Lucy Connolly | Jailed for a Tweet

Timothy Allen: Just to start with, it might be an idea to summarise what happened. I’ll briefly say it and then you can fill in the gaps. You basically wrote something on social media — Twitter, X as it’s known now — consequently deleted it because you thought it was a bit naughty. And you ended up in jail. You were sentenced to 31 months.

Lucy Connolly: 31 months, yeah.

Timothy Allen: And you’re just like a mum from Northampton.

Lucy Connolly: I am. I’m just a mum and a wife from Northampton.

Timothy Allen: This is what I find so astonishing. Because I don’t know — the free speech debate, I didn’t really think about free speech until recently, like the last few years.

Lucy Connolly: I probably agree. I didn’t either.

Timothy Allen: We’ve always been under this illusion that we have free speech in the UK.

Lucy Connolly: Have we though? Clearly not.

Timothy Allen: I know Americans have the First Amendment, which is a massive protection for them.

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, but I wouldn’t have said it was something we talked about as kids. You know, “oh yeah, we can say whatever we want.” But obviously right now we kind of know that’s not true. And you really do know it’s not true. There have been some ridiculous statistics out recently of people getting arrested, like fifty…

Timothy Allen: Whatever. So why don’t we start — let’s hear your story first, and then we can go into the nuts and bolts of what the hell’s going on.

Lucy Connolly: Yeah. So as you said, it was the day of the Southport massacre. I’m sure everyone knows what that is now. A day where some awful young lad walked into a community centre where there was a Taylor Swift dance class going on in the holidays, and massacred three beautiful children and injured many more. Like most people, I was absolutely distraught by the situation. I think it’s the biggest atrocity of my lifetime. And as a mother, it makes you think, “Jesus Christ, am I going to drop my daughter off at gymnastics or a dance class next week, and is some crazy person going to go in and do that there?” What has this country become when we can’t even pack our children off for the day in the summer holidays to something that would have been, to them, one of the best days of their life at that age? A Taylor Swift dance class, all these little Swifties — and their parents never get to pick them up. It’s the most horrific thing for those parents to pack their children off and never get to pick them up.

Unfortunately, I lost a child when he was 19 months old, so it resonates with me even more. I understand what that feeling is like and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. It’s incomprehensible — like you said, to pack your children off to a dance class and never get to pick them up.

So I made a tweet that evening. I think it was around half past six, possibly later. It wasn’t very nice.

Timothy Allen: Can I read it out? You’re not allowed to, is that right?

Lucy Connolly: You’re not allowed to read it out.

Timothy Allen: Well, you can tell me whether this is true or not, because I was struggling to — it’s hard to tell whether it’s real or not. “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.” Is that…?

Lucy Connolly: No, that’s very doctored.

Timothy Allen: Is that right?

Lucy Connolly: Yeah. I tried my hardest to find the real thing.

Timothy Allen: So let me think — without saying the bits that…

Lucy Connolly: So the first bit is right. “Mass deportation,” and then it said “and take your treacherous MPs with you. My heart breaks for those parents knowing what they’ll have to endure.” So that quote is made up.

What’s happened between me writing the tweet and now, mostly via the mainstream media, is they pick out the bits they’d like to use for their narrative. Because actually if you read the whole tweet, the horrible bits at the beginning — and then it says “for all I care” — there’s no instruction to carry anything out. There’s no instruction to incite anything. It then goes on to say that I blame the MPs and the establishment for what’s happened, because I do. And then the last bit says, “and if that makes me racist, so be it.” I put that bit because I knew at the time — and it’s worse now in the UK — if you have views on immigration, illegal immigration, that don’t align with say other people on perhaps the left, you’re instantly a racist, you’re a bigot. It’s a really boring argument that they’ve got now. They don’t have an intelligent debate in them, so they just say “you’re a racist, you’re a racist.” If you have a problem with all this unchecked illegal immigration, you’re a racist. That’s what you’re branded as.

Timothy Allen: Do you want to hear something crazy though? That quote that I just read out — this is me cross-referencing with AI, right — it says literally, verbatim, “the wording reported in court coverage and major reporting.” It does, because this is what they did. They cherry-picked the parts of the tweet that made it sound…

Lucy Connolly: But the swear word wasn’t even in it.

Timothy Allen: Oh no, the swear word was…

Lucy Connolly: Oh, the swear word was. Me and my swearing — I thought they made that up. No, that definitely came out of my mouth. But obviously it was absolutely the wrong thing to say, and it wasn’t a kind thing to say, and I knew that the same evening. Hence, after I’d calmed down, I took my dog for a walk, came home, deleted the tweet. I honestly didn’t think anything more of it. Until a whole week went past — and then it all blew up and I realised there was going to be a problem.

Timothy Allen: Did you have many followers at that time?

Lucy Connolly: Nine thousand and something.

Timothy Allen: So you were a bit of a tweeter anyway?

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, I was always on Twitter.

Timothy Allen: What about?

Lucy Connolly: Mostly politics, current affairs, that kind of thing.

Timothy Allen: So you’re a mum who tweeted a bit and got a bit, I mean — nine thousand isn’t masses to be honest.

Lucy Connolly: Well, you’re absolutely right. I think you need 300,000 to be an influencer.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but still, it was enough that your tweet showed up on the radar of — what, Scotland Yard, or someone like that?

Lucy Connolly: I don’t know about Scotland Yard, but it was definitely the local police. You’ll never convince me that it wasn’t actually a political takedown of my husband. For those that don’t know — and they say it enough — I am the wife of a Tory councillor.

Timothy Allen: Right, but a councillor though.

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, but that’s not big — I know, but they carry on like it is. You would be shocked at the absolute violent awfulness that goes on at low-level council. They carry on like they’re in the House of Commons, they really do.

Timothy Allen: So you mean at that level, another councillor…?

Lucy Connolly: I think it was a collective group of councillors. Long story short, my husband took a Labour seat. He’s not your typical on-paper Tory councillor. He’s just a normal guy, wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He’s just a generally nice guy trying to do well by people in his local area. And they didn’t like that. They tried their best to take him down at every opportunity, and I think they saw this and they were like, “bullseye — his wife’s a racist,” as they kept saying. Poor Ray, my husband, just got so much grief from it.

Timothy Allen: But you don’t think it came from a high level — this is infighting in local politics?

Lucy Connolly: 100% I believe it came from kind of local-politics-level infighting. The left saw it as a real good opportunity. Otherwise, why would you constantly refer to me as a Tory councillor’s wife? I don’t think the BBC, for example, have ever done a piece on me where they didn’t refer to me as the Tory councillor’s wife. It’s not necessary, is it?

Timothy Allen: So come on then — a week after you tweeted and then got remorse and took it down, what happened?

Lucy Connolly: So I took it down the same evening. It wasn’t a week later. I took it down the same evening. I thought, “no, you can’t write that, that’s a really awful thing to say.” I’d calmed down, the red mist had descended and gone. Carried on with normal life, carried on making everyday tweets that one does on Twitter. And it was the Monday after, exactly a week later, I saw something on Twitter one morning along the lines of, “look at this Tory councillor’s wife, she’s a racist, she’s a childminder, this and the other.” As the morning went on, more and more of these tweets appeared, almost like a hit job, so to speak. Every single tweet was, “look at this Tory councillor’s wife,” and they were tagging in the council, the police, Ofsted — because they’d obviously done their homework, they’d found out who I was. They seemed to know a lot about our family.

Every single tweet that morning. And I was like, “oh gosh, now I’m going to have to fess up to my husband,” because I hadn’t even told him that I’d written such a thing. I just wrote the tweet, thought better of it, took it down, didn’t think anything more of it. So then I had to say to him, “look, I’m really sorry, but I wrote this tweet, it’s come back to bite me, and they’re now dragging you into it.” They were — he had a page on Twitter at the time, they were tagging him. I don’t think I saw one tweet that morning, over the next 48 hours, that didn’t refer to my husband and me being a Tory councillor’s wife. So it became quite clear quite quickly that this was all about politics. I don’t believe to this day that the people that are outraged by what I said are outraged because they generally are upset by what I said. It’s just a political takedown and point-scoring.

I don’t believe that they’re that offended.

Timothy Allen: Well, I think some people really want you to suffer when you do something they don’t like. And I don’t mean even necessarily politically minded people. I just think vindictively.

Lucy Connolly: And even now, the way people come for me on social — it’s not like that in real life. Real life is very different. People are very kind, actually. But on social media, they still come for me. And I just can’t get over this. I say to people, regardless of what you thought of what I said — whether you thought it was the most outrageous, abhorrent thing ever — I did 12.4 months behind a prison door. I was away from my daughter, my family, for 12.4 months, and I’m now under probation until March 2027. Even if you really believe it’s the worst thing that anyone’s ever done, do you also not believe that I’ve done my time and I’ve paid for my mistake? But they don’t. They still say, “should have got 10 years, lock her back up.” And on probation now, week in, week out, people calling probation — “Lucy said this on Twitter, Lucy said that on Twitter, she’s said violent things.”

Timothy Allen: Is that why you’re not allowed to repeat —

Lucy Connolly: I’m not allowed to repeat that.

Timothy Allen: Is that the reason behind that? Because that would be you saying it again.

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, they would class it as not of good behaviour. So it would be not upholding my licence.

Timothy Allen: So the local police knocked on your door.

Lucy Connolly: Yeah. So a week later — obviously a whole 48 hours of all the Twitter tweeting went on and all the tagging — I just had an awful feeling. At this point my husband was saying, “Lucy, they’re not coming for you. You’re just a childminder, a housewife, you’re nobody, they’re not coming for you, calm down.” And my friend who’s a lawyer was saying the same thing — “they’re not coming for you, calm down.” Anyway, they did, didn’t they?

So the Tuesday — it was the Tuesday afternoon, so a week and a day after I’d made the tweet — two police officers knocked on my door and arrested me there and then, seized my phone, and took me straight to the local police station.

Timothy Allen: What did they say when they arrested you? Were they polite, nice?

Lucy Connolly: Ish. Yeah, they were a bit…

Timothy Allen: So we’re arresting you for what?

Lucy Connolly: It was Section 19 of the Public Order Act, for racism.

Timothy Allen: Was it racism or inciting?

Lucy Connolly: No, the actual charge is a public order charge. Section 19 of the Public Order Act. That’s what the charge is. There’s no charge of incitement and there’s no charge of violence. It’s actually a public order charge.

They arrested me, took me to the police station that evening, and questioned me. I had the duty lawyer there, and I told her what had gone on. Funnily enough, when I was explaining the situation, she said, “you know what, Lucy, you’ve put that really eloquently. I think you just need to go in there and explain to them what you meant by your tweet, why you put it, and the fact that you deleted it, and you’re not proud of it.” So that’s what I did, thinking that I’d done the right thing. Well, that wasn’t the right thing to do, was it?

Timothy Allen: What would the right thing to do have been?

Lucy Connolly: I don’t know. I think I would have gone “no comment.” I think that would have been my best option, because they couldn’t have twisted anything that I’d said in that interview, where I thought I was being quite innocent.

So they actually released me that night without charge. They didn’t charge me. The same evening, they released me without charge, on bail, with bail conditions not to post on social media. Didn’t break those bail conditions, and gave me a date a couple of months down the line to answer bail. So again, I went home thinking that was the end of it. If you’ve never been arrested, just being arrested and put in a cell for a few hours is enough to terrorise anybody. The punishment is in the process. That’s enough to make sure nobody like me ever does it again.

Timothy Allen: Like a cell with a little seat?

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, like a full-on metal toilet.

Timothy Allen: Oh shit, really? In the police station?

Lucy Connolly: In the police station, yeah. I mean, they were very nice to me, but still. That’s enough to terrorise anybody and to never say anything on social media again.

Timothy Allen: It’s not funny, but it would have been enough to make me think twice ever again about posting anything like that on Twitter.

Lucy Connolly: It’s enough to make you think, put it that way.

So I thought that was the end of it. And no — that Friday morning, so I was released Tuesday night, Friday morning about half seven, eight o’clock in the morning. It was before eight o’clock. I was putting the bins out in the street, I’d just had a shower, my hair was still wet. And I saw this police car coming down the street, and I just thought, “oh, here.” I just knew. It’s not unusual to see a police car in the street, but I just knew it was coming for me. They got out the car and they were like, “Lucy?” I said yeah. They were like, “we’re re-arresting you.” They arrested me for a second time, as opposed to asking me to come in again. I thought, “what’s this all about? I haven’t done anything, I haven’t posted on social media, I haven’t broken my bail conditions.”

When I got there it was all a bit cryptic. The same solicitor was on duty and she’d put in a complaint saying, “why have you re-arrested her? At worst, you should have brought her in for a voluntary interview, because you’ve already arrested her, she’s already on bail.” “Oh, these are new charges.” She was like, “what?”

They’d got this handful of tweets that they weren’t prepared to show the solicitor at this point, that were allegedly racist, from previously. So they’d gone through my Twitter — well, they hadn’t. Mr Khan, love him, who was the original complainant — the one that went to the police that the police acted on — it turned out he was frothing at the mouth that I’d been released and wasn’t very happy about that.

Timothy Allen: And the mayor of —

Lucy Connolly: No, no, no, no. I don’t know. Khan is a bit — sorry, isn’t it the way you said it then. All I know is the complainant was called Mr Khan. Mr Khan is like saying Mr Smith really, isn’t it. It’s a very common Asian name.

So he’d apparently gone back to the police on the Tuesday, having found out I’d been bailed, and was very angry about that, and provided them with a load of other stuff from my Twitter. Some of it had gone quite far back, like maybe two years. He’d obviously been watching my account for quite some time. He was obviously a fan. And he kindly provided some more tweets to the police. It was funny actually — Lee Anderson, one of the Reform MPs, tweeted yesterday about the definition of Islamophobia. Now, one of these tweets was exactly that. I was arguing with somebody saying, “it’s not a word, it’s a made-up word.” Well, that was one of the tweets that they had and claimed was racist.

Another one was — I’d called my friend a word that rhymes with “do as you likey” after he’d called me a Brummie c-word. It was quite clear that it was two friends. He’s a friend in real life. They were like, “well that word’s racist.” I’m like, “well, not if you’re calling your friend it as a joke, it’s not.”

There was another tweet — a few weeks prior in our town, there was a guy who’d been caught masturbating over children in one of our local parks. Lovely. He was an illegal immigrant, he was Somalian. I’d commented on this post and said, “Somalian — I guess there are a lot of them in that area” — with an emoji of a sick face. Because is it not pretty sick that an adult man, a grown man, is masturbating over children in the park? I thought I find that quite sick. Anyway, they twisted that to say, “well, you’re saying the Somalian is sick.” Well, no, I’m not. I’m saying it’s sick that there’s a grown man masturbating over children in the park.

And this particular post happened to originate from Tommy Robinson, and a friend of mine had tagged me in and said, “be careful Lucy, I know this is near you.” So they sat in their interview going, “do you know Tommy Robinson?” I was like, “what — what is this all about?” The solicitor was like, “everybody knows who he is, move on.” They were scraping the barrel.

But then they were trying to say that this was a different case — so this wasn’t linked to the original tweet and the original arrest, these were new tweets and this was a new arrest. Of which I was never charged for, by the way. It was only ever that one tweet.

So they re-arrested me on the Friday, kept me in, charged me that Friday evening — they’d arrested me around seven, eight o’clock in the morning, they remanded me around half past eight that evening, charged me with Section 19 of the Public Order Act for just the original tweet, none of the others. Kept me in. Then I was put in front of a magistrates court by video link the Saturday morning, told I wasn’t able to have bail. There were no grounds to remand me on. I wasn’t a flight risk. I’d never offended before. All the standard things — you ask any police officer, they sometimes sit on the phone and beg the CPS to remand people that they think are a danger to society, and they’re like, “no, no, there’s no grounds, you can’t remand them.” But funnily, they remanded me, kept me in custody, shipped me off to Peterborough prison Saturday afternoon. I was back in court Monday morning, on Monday afternoon, because they said it couldn’t be heard in magistrates court because it was too serious. It was what we call in this country an “either-way” case — a charge that can either be held in magistrates court or can be sent to Crown.

The telling thing about that is a magistrate can only give a sentence of up to two years imprisonment, and they very often suspend that if it’s a first offence. Crown starts from two years imprisonment, and they don’t suspend that. So I think that was quite telling in the beginning — that they were adamant that my case and all these cases like these, that were linked to the Southport riots… well, I debate that mine was linked to the Southport riots. There had been no riots when I made that tweet, and there weren’t any riots for a good week.

I do not accept that my tweet was incitement, and I do not accept that I was in any way, shape or form encouraging people to go out and riot and burn down hotels. In fact, when they did start doing that, I was mortified, and I tweeted as such. The police and the courts had that tweet to say I was saying, “please stop doing this, this is not the right thing to do. We need articulate, intelligent conversations with the right people. You’re playing into their hands.” So at no point did I ever condone the riots or say, “yeah, go out there and do that.” I do not accept that I had any part to play in these idiots going out and throwing bricks at police officers and setting fire to things. That wasn’t my doing, and I don’t accept that. I do accept the tweet was wrong, I do accept that I shouldn’t have written it, but I don’t take responsibility for what happened afterwards.

Timothy Allen: Did I hear that correct? So you didn’t go back home?

Lucy Connolly: No.

Timothy Allen: So you went straight to jail?

Lucy Connolly: So I was arrested and I was charged on the 9th of August 2024, and I finally returned home August the 21st 2025.

Timothy Allen: Bloody hell. No day release, no nothing? No tag?

Lucy Connolly: Nothing. Everything was blocked with me. Everything.

Timothy Allen: So you literally just went to jail, walked into a jail and came out 12.4 months later.

Lucy Connolly: That’s insane.

Timothy Allen: It is insane.

Lucy Connolly: It is insane when you think that people are doing horrific things — raping children — and getting suspended sentences. And then I wrote unacceptable words online and I got a 31-month prison sentence.

Timothy Allen: But they didn’t take into account the fact that you’d never done — there was no…

Lucy Connolly: There were lots of mitigating circumstances in my case. The fact that I had a young daughter. The fact that I had a husband that was seriously ill. The fact that I’d lost a child — and of course that has some bearing on how you feel and how you react when things like this happen. There were lots of mitigating circumstances. I have got a diagnosis of PTSD. There were lots of mitigating circumstances in my case, of which no mitigation was given. And when I tell you zero, I mean zero. The judge said in his sentencing remarks, “I know you’ve got a young daughter, I know you’ve got an ill husband, I know that you still very keenly feel the loss of your son, but I don’t care. Here’s 31 months.” Literally. No mitigation was given to me whatsoever.

Timothy Allen: Why do you think that was?

Lucy Connolly: Because they wanted to make an example of me. Unfortunately I do believe that — because I was married to a Tory councillor, it hit the news. It was a story. I couldn’t believe the things I was seeing on national news when I was in prison about me. I was like, “seriously, I’m nobody, I really am nobody, and I’m all over Sky News and the BBC.” Like I’ve just gone in there and massacred the children. I’m sure I saw my face more than I saw his. I’m not exaggerating.

Timothy Allen: The thing is though — and I’m quoting that Times article where they did some Freedom of Information stuff to get out how many people have been arrested — they came up with a figure of like 12,183. But that was in 2023. So there’s a lot of examples being made, by the sound of it.

Lucy Connolly: There is. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t the only one. There was poor Peter Lynch, the guy — similar thing. He was holding a board in the street, holding a board, and he got arrested and sentenced, and he ended up committing suicide in prison. He never came home. As far as I’m concerned, the government’s got blood on their hands for that one there. There were lots of people arrested at the time for things that I would debate were prisonable offences. But they were trying to make an example of people. They were saying, “if you disagree with us and you take to the streets, this is what’s going to happen to you.”

To a degree, I understand that. There were people in the streets rioting, burning things down. They had to get those people to stop, didn’t they? But you can’t possibly put someone like me in that category — somebody that was just purely upset about children being killed — and somebody that’s probably never even been on Twitter going out in the streets with knives and fighting and throwing bricks at the police. You can’t possibly put those two things in the same bracket. But randomly enough, the people that took to the streets causing the violence were getting less of a prison sentence than I got.

Timothy Allen: Arguably the reason they picked on you is because you are so not the normal kind of person. As an example.

Lucy Connolly: Absolutely. They wanted to make an example of me, because it was like, “if we can do this to her, we can definitely do it to you.” That was the message they wanted to send out. And for a long time it worked. For a long time people were very careful about what they posted on social media. I know that lots of my friends were busy deleting tweets — things that weren’t even that bad. But at this point they were like, “god, who knows what we can and can’t say anymore.” They were deleting tweets, and they were adamant they were going to get a knock at the door. I think their plan worked short term. But now, if you go on Twitter, people are still so angry about the way the UK is going that they’ve gone back to pretty much saying whatever they like, and to hell with the consequences, rightly or wrongly. So yeah, I think it worked short term. Long term, I’m not so sure that it did.

Timothy Allen: I’m desperate to hear what it’s like just going to jail. I used to be a news photographer years ago, and one time I was taken to — I think it was Bristol prison. The warden, just for a photo shoot, the warden said, “do you want to go in the cell?” I went, “go on then.” He shut the door behind me, and I got a really bad feeling — that feeling in the pit of your stomach. Like you say, there’s the toilet at the end that had no seat on it, two beds — were you sharing a room?

Lucy Connolly: No, I never had to share a room, luckily.

Timothy Allen: Describe what it’s like to just walk into a cell, though, and you knew how long you were supposed to be in there for.

Lucy Connolly: Right, no, not at this point I wasn’t. Obviously I had no idea. I had no idea what was going on. I was just going to prison until I was in court again. I had no understanding of the system at this point. It’s been a massive learning curve, because I’d never had any brushes with the law or the judiciary or anything. I didn’t know how the system worked. I did put another bail application in whilst I was in prison, in the early days, and I was absolutely adamant I was going to get that bail, and so was my solicitor. But no, I didn’t get that bail again.

Timothy Allen: So how long was it before you knew you were going to spend more than a year in jail?

Lucy Connolly: I was sentenced on the 17th of October. So I got arrested on the 9th of August and I was sentenced on the 17th of October.

Timothy Allen: So during that time you were assuming that you were probably going to get out.

Lucy Connolly: Yeah. Everyone thought I’d get time served. “They’ve made their point now, come on, this is silly.” That was the consensus across the board — the people I was in prison with, the officers, the solicitors, people in general were saying, “oh, she’ll go home, there’s no way they’re going to keep her, they’ve made their point.” Then when I came back from — I did it by video link — when I came back, people just couldn’t believe it. I think they were having me on. They were like, “no, you’re going home.” I said, “I’m not, they’ve just given me 31 months.”

Timothy Allen: Did that affect you badly?

Lucy Connolly: Oh yeah. I mean, I was expecting a custodial sentence — that much had been made very clear, which was another flaw in their system. The judge in Northampton had already told me I would be serving a lengthy custodial sentence before I even got to my sentencing, before they’d even allegedly looked into mitigating factors in the whole story. But there you go.

It was just like being in jail when you’re just a mum. Once you are settled, it’s not as bad as you think when you first go. It’s absolutely terrifying. I just thought I was going to get beat up and bog-washed and all of these things, and actually the women really aren’t like that. I think women’s jails and male jails are a very different ball game. I think generally women just put their head down, want to get their sentence done. A lot of them have children. A lot of them have families. They’re just more worried about their families on the outside than they are about themselves inside. I certainly was. The women are very good at supporting one another in prison.

I spent most of my time at HMP Peterborough, which is a private jail actually. I spent a few months at Drake Hall.

Timothy Allen: I didn’t even know we had private jails in the UK. What does that mean, a private jail?

Lucy Connolly: It’s not run by HMP, it’s run by Sodexo, actually, that one. So it’s a private jail.

Timothy Allen: Are the private ones better?

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, a lot better. Ironically, even the jails are better. I don’t know — it sounds an awful thing to say, but I found at Peterborough the calibre of prisoners was better than at Drake Hall.

Timothy Allen: Did you make friends?

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, I did. It sounds crazy because if you’d told me before — to be friends with the cocaine dealer before, I’d have been like, “I’m not associating with them,” turn my nose up. But obviously when you go to jail you meet these women, you hear their stories, and some of them have actually been in really heartbreaking situations. Everybody has got a story to tell. Very rarely do you find a woman in prison that’s just not a very nice person. Of course there are people that have done horrific things, but overall they have been failed by the system. There’s very often a man, a violent man, involved. Or they’re vulnerable women that have got caught up in things. Or young girls that have grown up in care and have just been promised this amazing life if they do X, Y and Z. Vulnerable and gullible. It’s really, really sad.

So the people in jail are not what we’re led to believe. They’ve actually been failed by the system.

Timothy Allen: Did you meet anyone who you considered to be in a similar situation to yourself, i.e. you shouldn’t really be in?

Lucy Connolly: Oh, loads. Probably 80% of those women, I would have let out of the door, and I would have been quite comfortable that you and I would both be safe on the streets. My take on jail, having been there, is that you should only use prison to house anybody that is a danger to society. If you could comfortably let them out on the street tomorrow and know that they wouldn’t reoffend or hurt anybody, there are other ways to deal with those people — in the form of community service, rehabilitation. There’s a million and one ways you can deal with people other than slamming them in jail away from their families, away from their children, and with no rehabilitation. Because don’t let anyone ever tell you there’s any rehabilitation in prison, because there is not in the UK. There’s not the money, there’s not the time, it’s not the resources. It doesn’t happen.

Timothy Allen: What was the most heartbreaking story you heard in there?

Lucy Connolly: Well, there were women in there that had hurt children. I was in with quite a few. There was this one awful girl — her name was Chelsea, I can’t remember her surname. Her and her boyfriend had murdered the baby, and they’d pushed this poor baby dead around in the pram for days. And when they were arrested, they were in Wetherspoons laughing, and they’d left this poor baby in the bath, dead.

This is the problem with women’s prisons. Because they’re not categorised, you are in with everybody, and I don’t think that’s fair. Why should I have been in with somebody like that? With men, that would be a Cat A prison or a Cat B prison — so they’re all similar crimes, similar offences are together, so to speak. Whereas with women, because the women’s population of prison is a lot smaller than males, they’re all just bundled together generally, dependent on the nearest prison to where you live, for obvious reasons. Peterborough just happened to be my nearest prison.

So I stayed away from people like them. They do tend to be kept on different wings, what they call the Vulnerable Persons wing, because they’re exactly that. People don’t take kindly to people that hurt children and things like that in prison, and they do take it upon themselves to take the law into their own hands. So they’re very protected.

But then I met — I don’t know if you know, and it’s quite a funny story — Virginia McCullough, who’s from Essex. She murdered her mum and dad and kept them at home for four years and lived in the house with them. She put one in the wardrobe — her mum in the wardrobe and bricked her up — and the dad, she made like a tomb in the kitchen and bricked him up.

Timothy Allen: Didn’t they smell?

Lucy Connolly: Apparently not. She can tell you all the stories of how she got rid of the smell and what she bought on the internet and stuff. She lived with them for four years until she got caught and arrested. But if you met her…

Timothy Allen: So she was in prison with you?

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, she was in prison with me.

Timothy Allen: What, you just meet these people at lunch and stuff?

Lucy Connolly: Yeah. Oh god, she was trying to buy my leggings off me one day for vapes. I said, “I don’t vape.” “What about if I make you some jewellery?” I said, “no thanks, I like these leggings.”

Timothy Allen: Oh my god.

Lucy Connolly: Yeah. Even if you’re not on the same wing as them, you’ll see them in the library, you’ll see them at work, or chapel, or the communal places, or passing in the corridors. Virginia made it her business to talk to everybody. It’s insane really, because she was actually quite nice.

Timothy Allen: Did it toughen you up? Presumably everyone knew that you were just the woman who got unlucky and ended up in jail. Didn’t they want to kind of step to you and try and beat you up?

Lucy Connolly: No, actually. Occasionally there was a couple of lovelies that did, but they just wanted to fight everybody. More at Drake Hall when I was there for a short time than at Peterborough. It just wasn’t like that at Peterborough really. The women just weren’t like that. I’m sure it does go on, but I kept myself to myself and I quickly learned how to play the game. Somebody said that to me very early on — “prison’s a game, and the quicker you learn to play the game, the easier…”

Timothy Allen: What’s the game?

Lucy Connolly: Just stay out of everyone’s way. Don’t get involved. Prison’s very political. It’s a bunch of women living together — you can imagine how bitchy it gets and the prison politics that go on. But I stayed well out of that. I had bigger things to worry about than who was sleeping with who on what wing and whatever. There’s a lot of that goes on — “pussy politics,” as they call it in prison.

Timothy Allen: What’s the saying?

Lucy Connolly: “Straight at the gate, gay for the stay.” That’s what they say.

Timothy Allen: Oh my god.

Lucy Connolly: But overall they were lovely to me, and the general consensus was that it was outrageous that I was even in there. At first I think some of the women were a bit, “oh, she’s a bit posh,” but then they got to know me and they realised that I wasn’t. I actually took a lot of, especially the youngsters, under my wing. I was kind of the mum of the prison — but not in the way that you might think. I wasn’t the one who ran the prison. I was the one going, “come on now, we’re not fighting today. Come on, we’re not kicking their head in today. Let’s just go and have a cup of tea instead.” A lot of these youngsters — that’s just their life, isn’t it? They don’t know how to articulate themselves, so they just kick someone’s head in, or they kick off at the prison officer.

Timothy Allen: Are you different now, do you think?

Lucy Connolly: Yeah. I have definitely learned a lesson and I have more time for people that have ended up in prison. I would have been — and I openly tell people this — that person that said, “well, they’re in prison, they’ve committed a crime, they should be there, I don’t see the problem.” But having been into that system and having lived that life and having met these women, I know that not to be true now. Most of them do not deserve to be there. They’re almost there because it’s the easiest thing for the system to do with them, instead of actually help them.

And making a mistake or doing something bad doesn’t make you a bad person. There are women in there that have messed up, that have done something bad, ended up in jail, but they’re not bad people. And there’s a reason — rightly or wrongly — that they’ve done what they’ve done. In their head, sometimes it’s justified, and you can kind of see their point. You can’t agree with what they’ve done. I used to say that regularly — “I don’t agree with what you did, but I can see how you ended up doing it and how you got into that situation, and I’m not going to hold it against you.”

So yeah, I think it’s made me a much better person in that sense, that I’m a lot less judgmental now towards people. Some of these women I stay in contact with and I would class as friends now. They’re people that got longer jail sentences than me or, on paper, did worse things than me.

Timothy Allen: It’s funny you say people said they didn’t agree with what you did — which is an interesting thought really, because I don’t think I care what you did. Like, do I agree with it? I don’t really care whether you tweeted something. I’m a bit like that — if I saw something on Twitter that I thought was outrageous, I’d be like, “prat,” and scroll past. I wouldn’t — it wouldn’t affect my day. I wouldn’t be so outraged by it. Do you think there’s any truth in the fact that people see — take your tweet specifically — do you think anyone saw that and went, “yeah, fuck this, let’s do something”? I don’t know — do you think that actually happens, or do you think people just do stuff like… you know what I mean?

Lucy Connolly: No. You’re asking me, do I think anyone acted upon it? No, I don’t. And there’s no evidence to suggest that. It’s that old saying — did your mum never used to say to you, “if your friend jumped in front of a bus, would you?”

Timothy Allen: Yeah, exactly. “If I tell you to jump out the window.”

Lucy Connolly: We are all responsible for our own actions, aren’t we? I could go and stab somebody now and then say, “but he told me to.” It doesn’t make it right, does it?

Timothy Allen: But that’s the thing — there is an idea that people can succumb to things like that. The question is, is it true or not? You mentioned Tommy Robinson earlier. He’s an interesting example, because he does garner a lot of attention. If he said something incendiary — I mean, maybe he does, I don’t really follow him — but then if you’re talking about millions of people, a very small percentage of them might use that as a reason. I don’t know enough.

Lucy Connolly: Possibly. But I think they would do that anyway. Does that make sense? The people that went out in the streets and took knives and weapons and fought people and threw bricks at police, they’re the type of people that would do that anyway. They were just looking for an excuse. That’s the way I see it. 99% of us would never dream of acting in such a way no matter how angry we were. They just saw the news and —

Timothy Allen: There’s a big difference between saying something and doing it. I’ve wanted to punch loads of people in my life, but I’ve never punched anyone in my life.

Lucy Connolly: But what you’re saying is that everyone saw the news. The way you acted on it was tweeting. The way someone else might act on it is to go down to whatever street where they can see on the news some shit’s going down — “let’s go and join in with that.” And that’s exactly what did happen. Unfortunately, we all got put in the same category, which I don’t necessarily — I don’t think that was — I don’t think it was right that somebody was in the street. There were cases of people being in the street and just maybe filming or holding up a board that got the same repercussions as somebody that was fighting and abusing the police. The two aren’t the same.

The law quite clearly states we have a right to protest in this country, as long as it’s done in a way that’s not violent. So how is standing in the street filming, or standing in the street with a board, warrant an arrest and going to prison? It doesn’t. But they were treated to the same merit as somebody with a crowbar or a knife and fighting people in balaclavas. The two just aren’t the same.

Timothy Allen: Why are crazy things like this happening? Do they always happen, or are we living through this time where weird things are happening? Because this is insane what you’re telling me.

Lucy Connolly: I think the latter. I think the government have always been a law to themselves — whoever we’re under, we have to toe the line, don’t we? And it’s always been one rule for them, another for us. That’s never been any different. The elites and the globalists have always ruled the world, haven’t they? And it will never change.

But I think with this particular government, it very much is about control. In the situation that I found myself in, and the people that were arrested over the Southport riots — the government had lost control and they didn’t know how to get that control back, so they had to make a serious stance. But how they handled it was wrong. Keir Starmer made a speech very, very early on, before any arrests were made, to say anybody involved in this — be it online, be it in the streets, however which way — “you will feel the full force of the law, you will be going to prison, you will get arrested, you will be remanded.”

Why could he not understand that people were upset and emotional and angry that three children had been massacred? Why could he not come out and say, “we understand you’re cross, we understand there’s an issue in this country, we understand that we need to fix it, but this is not the way to do it and we won’t tolerate this.” Why could he have not said that? Why did he have to come out and tell us all — act like some kind of communist — “you will, and we will do this, and we don’t care”? He’s basically saying, “we don’t care what you think, we don’t care that you’re upset that three children have just been massacred, we don’t care that our country is being flooded by illegal men that have got no respect for women and children, we don’t care.” That’s what he’s saying, and that’s how I interpret it, and that’s how a lot of people are interpreting it.

Timothy Allen: I think that’s how I interpret it as well. It’s like we’re now not allowed to be upset about that. And if you are upset about that, “to prison for you” is the message they’re sending out.

Lucy Connolly: Well, it’s an authoritarian play, isn’t it?

Timothy Allen: Definitely. It’s just “do as I say.” There’s no…

Lucy Connolly: Absolutely.

Timothy Allen: Which could well be a sign of the times. I don’t really know. Without — it does seem a little bit crazy these days. But then again, I think it’s fair to say I haven’t really been politically active until recently. Have you?

Lucy Connolly: No, I wouldn’t say I was, really, until probably the last 12, 18 months. I had my views. I was obviously married to somebody in politics, but — crazily enough — I wouldn’t say he’s that political. He’s just trying to do a good job for the local council, for the area that we live in. I wouldn’t say he was that embroiled in the politics of it. He’s had to become that, but that’s because of this. And I wouldn’t say before that I was political. I knew who I wanted to vote for, I knew who I supported, I knew what I wanted and what I didn’t want. I was very vocal about my political views. But I was certainly not out in the streets leafleting.

Timothy Allen: One thing I noticed about authoritarian leaders or governments in general is in the end everyone becomes an enemy of them slowly but surely. For me, it was 2020 and the Covid lockdowns and this kind of stuff that’s what made me much more acutely aware of someone saying “don’t do that.” We just had that conversation outside.

Lucy Connolly: I think a lot of this stemmed from Covid. I think it never went away. I think our lives are very different now to what they were prior to 2019, 2020, and I think that was the catalyst and that’s where it stemmed from.

Timothy Allen: What does your husband think about all this now? Is he still a councillor?

Lucy Connolly: Yes, he’s still there.

Timothy Allen: Still there. Getting a lot of hate mail?

Lucy Connolly: Probably no, not at all actually. Social media isn’t the real world. On the streets — I have sacks and sacks and sacks of letters and emails that I got whilst I was in prison from people sending well wishes and love and saying how outraged they are at the situation, and “don’t let the bastards get you down,” all this kind of thing, “don’t let them win.” Equally, of course he had the odd email saying, “Tory scum,” that kind of thing, “stand down.” But overall he’s had masses of support, even from other Labour councillors that know him, that are his friends, that work with him, that know he’s not this person that they were painting him out to be, or me to be.

In real life we’ve had a lot of support, and the majority of people think this is insane. The whole situation is insane, and are quite cross by it, worried for themselves and their own families that they could end up in — “there for the grace of god go I.” Everybody generally is worried that they could end up in this situation. They look at me and they think, “well, if it could happen to you, why couldn’t it happen to me?” This is what I say to all these people that are supporting this — these hardcore left — I say, “you’re not safe. The minute you don’t agree with something they do, they’ll come for you too. Don’t for one minute think that you’re safe. So why are you supporting this? Because it could happen to any one of you.”

Timothy Allen: Are you tweeting again now? Are you allowed to tweet?

Lucy Connolly: Yes, I am.

Timothy Allen: And have you become — I’m going to go ahead and assume you have — become somewhat of a figure in the free speech movement now?

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, I think people are quite interested in what I’ve got to say and my views going forward. I think I’ve got like 53,000 followers now. So it’s not an insane amount — it’s a good amount, but it’s not an insane amount. Funny enough, the Americans are very interested in my story, because they’ve got the First Amendment, so they just find it really insane that you can go to prison for a tweet. I think lots of countries, including America, are watching this country right now thinking, “what on earth is going on over there? I’m glad I’m not there.”

Timothy Allen: Do you have to self-censor?

Lucy Connolly: I have to, because they’ll put me back in prison. I’m on licence.

Timothy Allen: It’s interesting, isn’t it, because the tweet you got called out on was obviously you angry. But you can tweet in a non-angry state and still get put away for it.

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, because anything that’s deemed to be — I don’t know — violent, or even a joke, something that you say in jest, people will ring up probation and say, “Lisa said this,” and then probation are on my back saying, “we’ve had this complaint because you’ve said this.” I said, “it’s a joke.” “Yes, but they’ve taken offence.” Someone calls them up regularly, all the time, every week. I think a couple of weeks ago I think they broke the record for something I tweeted that they thought was — it’s madness, absolute madness. Every other week I go in there and they’re like, “oh, we’ve had this come in. Did you tweet this?” Yes, yes I did, what’s your point?

Timothy Allen: So if you were — and that’s being quite watered down, that’s being quite careful, right? If you were tweeting what you were actually thinking half the time, even without being derogatory, I think you’d definitely be banged up again by now.

Lucy Connolly: I think I would. I would, yeah.

Timothy Allen: Do you ever think about moving somewhere like America?

Lucy Connolly: All the time. All the time. I’m in a position where I could go, but currently because I’m on licence, if I go and then step back here, they’d arrest me, really.

Timothy Allen: So if you were tweeting out of America, then they would judge you on British law?

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, because I’m on licence until March. So I have to report into probation and abide by my licence conditions until March 2027. They watch everything I do and say.

Timothy Allen: So after March 2027, conceivably, you stop getting —

Lucy Connolly: Not in this country. Only joking. But you’ll stop getting…

Timothy Allen: For people that don’t — Americans might — probation happens in America. It’s the same, right?

Lucy Connolly: I think it’s called parole in America.

Timothy Allen: This is making sure that you’re a good person for a couple of years. How long was it, two years?

Lucy Connolly: Well, in total, 31 months.

Timothy Allen: Oh, is that how they work it out?

Lucy Connolly: I got 31 months. 40% of that was served in prison and the remainder on licence.

Timothy Allen: But presumably now whenever you travel abroad —

Lucy Connolly: Oh, I’m not allowed to travel abroad.

Timothy Allen: Really?

Lucy Connolly: I’m not allowed to travel abroad on licence. They’ve stopped —

Timothy Allen: What about after?

Lucy Connolly: Yeah, I can go afterwards. But still — I’ve just filled in a visa form, and one of the questions is “have you been…” I was invited to America just after I got out of prison with Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage went to a free speech conference and gave evidence there, and they invited me, and Nigel wanted me to go with him.

Timothy Allen: But they wouldn’t let you go?

Lucy Connolly: No.

Timothy Allen: Really?

Lucy Connolly: No.

Timothy Allen: So come on then, let’s have a positive ending. What’s come of it for you?

Lucy Connolly: First, I think I’m in a position to help people that are in a lot less fortunate situation than me, and I understand the system. So I have been able to, and still continue to, help people — women that are still in prison, women that are coming out of prison. I think I’ve been able to make a positive impact on their lives. I really hope that going forward I will be able to work with the people that make the laws in the prisons and the prison system, and try and make some positive change.

I do actually believe the tide is turning in this country slightly. I do think that people are waking up, so to speak, and saying, “you know what, this is not what we want.” Even people I know that have been hardcore Labour supporters all their lives are going, “never again. This is not what I voted for. This is not what Labour means to me.” People don’t want this nanny state, they don’t want this authority over them.

Timothy Allen: Sorry to butt in. Because I don’t know nearly enough about this — if this sounds stupid please forgive me — but are you saying that under Labour this is happening a lot more than it did before? Did you know anybody that went to prison for social media posts?

Lucy Connolly: No, I didn’t. No, this is a new thing. It’s been infiltrated. Anybody that works in the police service will tell you now how woke and left the police have become. They’re supposed to police without fear or favour, and they’re supposed to be apolitical, but they’re not. We know they’re not. I think that got worse when Labour came in, because Starmer’s got massive links into the CPS and into the judiciary, hasn’t he? That was his bread and butter before he came into politics. He knows all the right people.

Five years ago you wouldn’t even entertain the idea of going to prison for something you said. Now it’s a very realistic possibility that you will go to prison for something.

Timothy Allen: I suppose the way I’m thinking about it is, I think of it as an authoritarian thing. I don’t think of it as a left or a right thing.

Lucy Connolly: But I think it is, because I think you’re safe for now if you’re on board with their political views. Ricky Jones is a perfect example of that. I don’t know if you know about Ricky Jones — the guy, about the same time as me, when all the riots were happening, he was in the street. He was a Labour councillor, so he had a much more influential position than I did. He was a Labour councillor, and he was — I can’t remember the exact words — he was in the street with a board and a microphone inciting violence, and basically advocated to slit people’s throats. That’s what he was doing. He was also arrested around the same time as me. He managed to get bail, funnily enough. So they did remand him initially, but then they bailed him. They were not entertaining bailing me at all. So he was obviously able to get out and seek really good legal advice and look at his options. I wasn’t able to do that. We were arrested for similar things but treated very, very differently. Now, why was that?

Timothy Allen: But does that happen consciously, or…?

Lucy Connolly: No, I don’t think it does. I think it’s all by design. I think we 100% are living by a two-tier justice system, and a two-tier policing based on your political beliefs and what side of the spectrum you vote for. That is how it currently is.

Timothy Allen: But when you say you think the police force has become very left — obviously that’s something that’s the individuals in the force who are believing —

Lucy Connolly: But it’s coming down from the powers that be, it’s coming down from the College of Policing. There’s so many people that you speak to in policing now that say we need to do away with the College of Policing, because this is where it’s all coming from. I know so many ex-police that have left the police now that just say to me, “I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed of what the police force has become. Why are we not out there getting real criminals? Why are we arresting people over words? That’s not what people signed up to the police force to do. We signed up to catch criminals, not people that say naughty things on the internet.”

You’ll never convince me that the judiciary and the police has not become politicised, and it is very much left-leaning and controlled.

Timothy Allen: How do you think that changes then? Because it strikes me that it’s not enough to just have a different ideology in power, because it’s people whose job it is to be in the police who’ve got ideological beliefs, and they happen to be police.

Lucy Connolly: I think also it’s that they’re scared for their own jobs. They might not necessarily agree with that — that might not be what they want to do — but we hear time and time again of a police person, whatever you’re allowed to say now, being on a job, and they’re told what they are and aren’t allowed to do. They’re no longer allowed to use their integrity and make their own judgment and make their own call. They’re told, “no, you must do this and you must do that.” They probably don’t want to do it nine times out of ten. They probably think this is nonsense. But if they don’t, they lose their job.

Timothy Allen: Did you find — the police you’d had interactions with, did you find that they were apologetic?

Lucy Connolly: No, no, no.

Timothy Allen: Why do you think that was?

Lucy Connolly: The original officer that arrested me — about what you’re about to say, I just saw you, I don’t want you to go back to jail — just basically had a new job. It was her first week in her new job as heading up the Hate Crime Department.

Timothy Allen: Right.

Lucy Connolly: So this is what we now have — Hate Crime Departments in the police. Bearing in mind we’re told they’re overstretched, they haven’t got the resources to catch criminals and rapists and murderers — but they’ve got the resources to set up a Hate Crime Department. So I think for her it was, “all our Christmases have come at once.” She got the big hate crime —

Timothy Allen: Nick. Right, let’s finish — but I want to finish on a positive note. Most positive thing that’s come from it for you? You seem very happy, you seem very content. You don’t seem like — people hate that.

Lucy Connolly: They want me to be bitter, and I’m not. Because yes, it was shit what happened to it. But it was more shit for my family. They suffered more than I did, I’m telling you now. My 13-year-old daughter suffered way more than I did in prison, being out without her mummy. And of course I’m bitter about that. But I am not going to let these people win. I feel like I’ve got a job to do. People have said to me, “do you not think this has happened for a reason?” I’m not a massive believer in everything happens for a reason, because some things should just never happen. But maybe it did. Maybe it did happen for a reason. If I can make a difference to just one or two people’s lives during my life, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? And if I can make a difference in trying to turn this whole thing around, that can only be a good thing. Even if I can only make a small difference, that’s good enough for me. I am content.

That’s what people don’t like. I have a nice life. I have a nice husband and a nice family, and I’m not — we’re just normal people. But in lots of ways we’re very lucky. We’ve had our own stuff to deal with, of course we have. But I’m not going to let people beat me, and I’m not going to let people make me bitter. I’m not having it.

Timothy Allen: Fair enough. I’m with you on that. I just think it’s an astonishing story really. Because a couple of years ago, people were talking about these kind of things, “people going to jail for a tweet, blah blah blah,” and you just don’t believe it. You think that’s not true.

Lucy Connolly: But it is true. And there’s a lot of them — I could vouch for that.

Timothy Allen: I just think it’s amazing, and I’m very thankful that you came to share your story. Thanks, and good luck. We all want free speech.

Lucy Connolly: We do.

Timothy Allen: I’ve got no idea — it’s non-negotiable, isn’t it really? I don’t know how you make it happen, to be honest. Because when you spend a fair bit of time in America, when you see something as powerful as the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, you realise — Jesus.

Lucy Connolly: Maybe we need one of those.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, of course we do. But how do you get that?

Lucy Connolly: A government that’s prepared to listen to the people that voted them in.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but the mechanism of government we have here is at its worst stage, I think.

Lucy Connolly: But I think it can be done. Some days I have these days where I think we’re doomed, just move, just go to a different country. And other days I think, no, we can do this. There’s enough people now that are realising what’s going on, and are prepared to fight for the country. I think we’re turning the tide slowly. I think we are.

Timothy Allen: Wow. Thank you, because I’m very black-pilled on the country at the moment. I’m very despondent. Looking around — on paper everything seems to be going the wrong direction, doesn’t it.

Lucy Connolly: Yes.

Timothy Allen: The only consolation is that normally things rebound from the worst position. The dawn after the dark. Sometimes we have to hit rock bottom, don’t we, before we come back up.

Lucy Connolly: Well, you certainly sound like you might have done. I don’t know whether it was even rock bottom. You seem strangely happy and funny and joking.

Timothy Allen: And I’ve said this all along — the worst thing in the world that could ever happen to anybody had already happened to me. So nothing can top that. This was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as that. I’ve already lived through the worst thing, and I will, until the day I die, have lived through the worst thing that could ever happen to any parent. So this is just nothing in comparison. Like I said, it had more detriment to my daughter than it did to me.

Lucy Connolly: Think about everything — about going into politics, I mean —

Timothy Allen: Watch this space.

Lucy Connolly: Well, you know what it’s like. You’ve been thrown into a situation —

Timothy Allen: I didn’t —

Lucy Connolly: It’s a bit of a silly saying, but it makes me laugh when people take the mick when they say this — “you didn’t choose this life, it chose you.”

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but that’s kind of what it seems like. You’ve been given — well, if you want to spin it in the positive — for sure you’ve been given an opportunity to be something.

Lucy Connolly: But I’m not anyway. I’m not a big fan of politics, to be honest.

Timothy Allen: It’s horrible. Let’s face it, it’s nasty.

Lucy Connolly: It’s nasty business, is politics. It is.

Timothy Allen: Anyway, Lucy, look — you’ve got to go on stage very soon. Thanks for coming in, it’s brilliant speaking to you. Thank you very much.

Lucy Connolly: Thank you.

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Editorial notes

Cleaned-up script. Filler words trimmed, transcription errors corrected, proper nouns verified. The pre-interview setup (mic check, water, headphones) has been removed. The conversation has been lightly edited for readability while preserving Lucy’s voice and meaning.

Proper nouns verified:

• Daniel Hannan (transcript had “Hannon” — corrected; though that reference was in the pre-interview chatter which has been cut)
• Virginia McCullough (transcript had “McCulloch” — corrected to the actual spelling)
• Lee Anderson, Reform UK MP for Ashfield — verified
• Tommy Robinson — verified
• Peter Lynch, died at HMP Moorland on 19 October 2024 — verified
• Ricky Jones, Labour councillor — verified (acquitted by a jury)
• HMP Peterborough (run by Sodexo) — verified
• HMP Drake Hall — verified
• Birmingham Crown Court — verified
• Section 19 of the Public Order Act — verified (correct statutory reference is Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986)
• Keir Starmer — verified
• Nigel Farage — verified
• Sky News, BBC, Ofsted, CPS — verified

Not verified / kept as Lucy said it:

• “Chelsea” — Lucy explicitly says she can’t remember the surname. The case she describes matches Chelsea Gleason-Mitchell (Ipswich, 2023), partner Scott Jeff, victim Isabella Wheildon. Strictly, Gleason-Mitchell was acquitted of murder and convicted of causing/allowing the death and child cruelty (10 years); Scott Jeff was convicted of murder. Lucy’s recollection of “murdered the baby” is slightly imprecise but is presented as her recollection.
• “Mr Khan” — Lucy doesn’t name the specific complainant publicly and notes it is a very common name. Left as she said it.

Cuts:

• Pre-interview chatter (mic check, headphones, water, “can you say a few words”) removed
• Filler words and false starts trimmed for readability throughout
• Lucy’s voice, cadence, swearing and meaning preserved