Eighteen minutes into Lucy Connolly’s surprise appearance at Reform UK’s rally-conference in Birmingham, I turned around and scanned the faces in the auditorium. The crowd was bathed in turquoise light. Pints of lager were held tightly in plastic cups. People seemed to be leaning forward, half on their seats, tilting towards Connolly. I noticed three women: they were middle-aged and part of a demographic that has broken towards Nigel Farage’s party in the last year to the extent that Reform now has marginally more support among women than Labour.
It was the most telling moment of the two-day conference. Thousands of words have been wasted by the media trying to work out if Reform is aesthetically “camp” or “whacky” or “end of the pier” or “daytime television-coded”. But here was, if the polls are to be believed, a convicted prisoner and self-confessed racist being crowned by the next government as a blessed saint and a bleeding martyr for their cause, a cross between Nelson Mandela and Kyle Rittenhouse. Connolly was treated as normal, not aberrant. Nobody around me believed she had done anything wrong.
Connolly, interviewed on stage by the Daily Telegraph’s Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson, was talking about her son Harry. Fourteen years ago, Harry died – a catastrophic blow to Connolly’s family made worse by NHS negligence. Harry’s death, she and her partner Ray believed, was preventable. The tragedy continued to colour her life in unexpected ways. She felt she could not really be hurt anymore: as a mother, the worst thing that could happen to her had already come to pass. She talked about this softly and slowly. The thousands of Reformers in the stands around the stage listened along as quiet as church mice.
I looked at each of the three women in turn. Each of them was silently crying, while their partners held their hands.
On the evening of Monday 29 July last year Lucy Connolly posted on X. It was a few hours after three girls were murdered at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport. Rumours circulated online that the killer was an asylum seeker, a Muslim who had crossed the channel on a small boat to enter England. Connolly, afraid for the safety of her 12-year-old daughter (she would later describe herself in court as a “ridiculously overprotective mother”) sent the following tweet:
“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.” The post was deleted three and a half hours later, but not before it had been reposted 940 times and been viewed 310,000 times on X.
On 6 August Connolly was arrested for the post, then bailed. Three days later she was arrested again and interviewed by the police about previous tweets. She was charged under Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986, with distributing material intending to stir up racial hatred, and with the more serious crime of intending to incite serious violence.
In the days between Connolly’s post and her arrest, riots shook England and Northern Ireland. In Tamworth and Rotherham crowds attempted to set fire to asylum hotels while they were housing human beings. On 1 August, as the riots began to spread, Keir Starmer began to lay some of the blame on social media companies and their users for the criminal activity. He described it as “violent disorder, clearly whipped up online, that is also a crime, it’s happening on your premises, and the law must be upheld everywhere”.
This was the Prime Minister in full “Mr Rules” mode. If there is such a thing as Starmerism, it can be found in such statements. Rules, norms, conventions and procedures must be upheld. Starmer, a former public prosecutor, has always been happy to be perceived as tough and ruthless, as long as that toughness and ruthlessness is in defence of existing rules and standards. “The law must be upheld everywhere.”
The Conservative Party, who have since tried (unsuccessfully) to cash in on Connolly’s enormous popularity on the British right, put forward little criticism of Starmer’s pledge to review social media laws in the wake of the riots.
But they did attract a ferocious response from Reform UK. Richard Tice, MP for Boston and Skegness, described Starmer’s plans as “the stuff of dictatorships”. Tice would later visit Connolly in prison after she was found guilty of inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing “threatening or abusive” written material on X last October. She was sentenced to 31 months in jail, with a 25 per cent reduction in her sentence because she pleaded guilty.
When Connolly appeared on the main stage at Reform, she was greeted by the loudest noise I have heard outside of a warzone: a sustained, screaming, shaking ovation. It was also the first time I have seen a self-confessed racist, introduced as “Britain’s favourite political prisoner”, interviewed at a party political conference.
If the aim of Connolly’s sentence was to discourage others from following her example then it has backfired. Mass deportations, a policy that Connolly herself rejected when she was asked if she supported it by a prosecuting lawyer last October, are now a promise Reform will have to keep if they form the next government. More horrific statements than Connolly’s are a minute-by-minute occurrence on X. You do not have to travel particularly widely around Britain to hear such statements made out in the open: “set fire to the hotels”; “shoot the boats crossing the channel”; “a civil war is coming”.
The official British right, whether it comes in the form of Farage’s party or the sinking Tories, are struggling to keep up with the radicalism of their own voters. In Connolly that base has found a martyr.
Connolly was widely described as “middle-class” in the initial reporting on her case. Not quite right. Her accent, her manner, her 1930s semi in a small Midlands town: she is not the sort of person that, to put it mildly, many of those who have written about her case would know socially. Connolly does, however, resemble the median Reform voter in 2025. The party leads both Labour and the Conservatives with working class voters. When those voters look at Connolly they see themselves. Some of them cry. They might have sent that tweet. They might have been imprisoned for 380 days.
As Connolly’s sentence was handed down last October, Judge Melbourne Inman KC said: “It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive. There is always a very small minority of people who will seek an excuse to use violence and disorder causing injury, damage, loss and fear to wholly innocent members of the public and sentences for those who incite racial hatred and disharmony in our society are intended to both punish and deter.”
Judging by what has happened since, Imran was wrong. That small minority is beginning to look like a large majority. That group may not riot again but they will relish the opportunity to put Nigel Farage in Downing Street.
[See also: Nigel Farage really means it this time]
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