This is the opening to my essay on the debate about Lucy Connolly, published in the Observer on 24 August 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer.

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Somehow, Lucy Connolly has become a hero. Released last week after serving 10 months, 12 including time on remand, of a 31-month sentence, she has become lionised as a free-speech champion, a figurehead for immigration reform and the self-proclaimed “political prisoner” of Sir Keir Starmer.

Connolly’s imprisonment was misguided. The acclamation now being heaped upon her is nauseating.

The story begins a year ago, after the grotesque murders by Axel Rudakubana of three young girls at a dance class in Southport. In the riots that followed, some people targeted mosques, others attempted to set fire to hotels hosting asylum seekers, all believing various false rumours that the killer (whose details had at that stage not been made public) was a Muslim, an asylum seeker, someone who had crossed the Channel in a small boat. Connolly published (and later deleted) a bigoted, inflammatory tweet: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care”.

She was charged with inciting racial hatred, pleaded guilty and was given a custodial sentence. I have argued before that the legal threshold for incitement in Britain has become too low – I would prefer the American “Brandenburg test” that speech must be intended to incite “imminent lawless action” and likely to produce such action – and that, as vile as Connolly’s tweet was, she should not have been imprisoned.

There is, though, nothing becoming in the praise now being showered upon her. The final line in the Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson’s sycophantic interview with Connolly on her release – “Cry God for Harry, England, and Lucy Connolly” – sums up the absurdity of the whole enterprise.

Read the full version of the essay in the Observer.