I HEARD shocking allegations last week that Lucy Connolly – the mother slung in prison for a tweet during the Southport riots – was being badly mistreated inside.
As an MP with special privileges, I was able to make a hastily-arranged visit to HMP Peterborough to speak to her for myself.
What she told me was deeply sinister, and has left me genuinely concerned that someone, somewhere, is trying to keep her locked up for longer.
It has been almost a year since Lucy, in a moment of madness, posted on X urging her followers to “set fire” to migrant hotels.
The mum from Northampton was summarily banged up for 31 months with a conviction for inciting racial hatred and has had subsequent appeals chucked out.
The whole point of justice is it has to have the confidence of the people it serves — to be decent, fair and equally applied.
But while those who upset the “Keir brigade” are locked up in jail, drug-dealing illegal migrants claim they can’t be deported for ludicrous reasons.
Ludicrous reasons
It is clear confidence is rapidly disappearing down the plug hole, replaced by a genuine fear that we have moved to a two-tier justice system.
And so it seems, too, with Lucy’s experience in prison.
Until last Thursday, she told me she basically had no complaints about her treatment apart from a few niggles.
She had been told very clearly all along that, because she was a model prisoner, she was going to what was essentially the “good girls wing”.
Then suddenly she was informed that she would actually be incarcerated in the “naughty girls wing” for the more violent inmates.
Naturally, she was pretty upset with this and challenged the decision — and it was as she was making her case in the adjudication room she noticed lots of wardens gathering around her.
It was on seeing the nurse hovering outside that she clocked something bad was about to happen, because a medic is always present whenever officers are preparing to use force.
And sure enough, they jumped on her, flattened her on the floor, pushed her arms right behind her back and slapped on very tight handcuffs.
She then described to me being bent over and dragged three flights of stairs to the naughty girls wing, where she was thrown in the cell for the rest of the day with no lunch or tea.
Why would they go from using the lightest form of restraint to the most severe in the blink of an eye?
It’s so inexplicable that I genuinely believe you have to think the unthinkable: they are trying to provoke a reaction to say she has got violent tendencies and deny early release.
Or have they put her on a wing riddled with drugs, to plant some in her cell?
I have demanded the head of security reviews all the bodycam footage to get to the bottom of what happened.
There’s a very, very bad potential there. I told Lucy: “You’ve got to stay calm — don’t allow yourself to be provoked.”
She assured me that she had not reacted.
Staying in prison for a second longer than she has to is not an option.
Her situation is horrendous.
She’s got a desperately worried husband and a distressed daughter.
But she is resilient.
Shaken up — and with visible bruises — but resilient, and over our chat, she was completely lucid, rational and intelligent.
Massive mistake
We didn’t spend much time raking over her tweet — she obviously feels it was a massive mistake she regrets.
But when the inmates in her new wing asked what she was in for — and she replied “a tweet” — they literally fell about laughing.
Imagine: Violent, drug-taking women collapsing into laughter being told that someone had joined them because she’d sent a nasty tweet.
Judgments like this are why I proposed “Lucy’s Law”, so a sentence is triple-checked by a review commission if enough people object via a petition.
The quantity of emails and messages I have received supporting this has been incredible — we have captured the public mood.
It seems many judges took Starmer’s speech after the Southport riots — hitting out at “far-right thugs” — as an order to hand down extremely harsh sentences.
I am also deeply concerned that legal aid lawyers deliberately and wrongly advised them all to plead guilty, saying they would get lighter sentences.
That has proved a deception.
I think the legal system at best has let itself down.
At worst, it has been conspiratorial with the Prime Minister.
