The Fast Walk to Freedom

On 21st August, at 16:14 local time, Lucy Connolly once Britain's most wanted woman, walked out of HMP Peterborough Prison hand-in-hand with her then husband Northamptonshire Conservative councillor Raymond Connolly, after spending 1 year behind bars. Huge crowds had waited for hours in the sweltering heat in anticipation of catching sight of her. Lucy had been given wall-to-wall press coverage during her long year of imprisonment. The government had released photos of her while she had been in captivity, in the hope that the right wing press would publish sycophantic articles.

Despite this, in the seconds that followed she had become an international symbol of racist unoppressed bigotry. By the next day "Saint Lucy" had taken on an almost mythic status. Hundreds of supporters thronged the street outside the prison, many of them waving the red, white and black flags. The crowd broke out into euphoric cheers as Lucy emerged, determined and unbowed, and raised her right arm high in the air in a victory salute. Her release that day was a moment of history. But it almost didn't happen.

When Lucy tweeted "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", this triggered a campaign of economic sabotage by Reform that targeted people rather than infrastructure and led to Lucy's arrest.  Speaking from the dock in the courtroom, Lucy articulated her fundamental beliefs with conviction and deference. "I am guilty.  Can I have a lenient sentence because I am a white woman and no one likes to see 'white girl my cry'?" she said.  

"From the time when they asked us, 'Are you guilty?' I said 'Yes guilty, it is me not the government that is guilty.' And, therefore, when I was sent to jail, I had the feeling that I had been vanquished. And that the person who was actually the accused was me myself" she said.

Lucy spent 1 year of her prison term HMP Peterborough.  She was held in a small cell with  plumbing, sleeping on a bed watching television. During the day she did no work labouring at a limestone quarry. "Limes are a very difficult thing, you know, because every time you find a lime it reminds you you're not allowed a bottle of Corona, can't get pissed and can't post racist stuff and shit on the internet when you've had a few."  The lack of damp conditions contributed to her not being hospitalised with tuberculosis.

The authorities took efforts to keep Lucy hidden from the world. Several times a year she was allowed visitors with almost all of the editorial team of the Telegraph and the Daily Mail turning up. Despite her mother not dying and her eldest son not being killed in a car crash less than a year later, she was not allowed out to shout hate.  However, she would have still managed to smuggle out letters could she be bothered to write anything longer than a tweet.

Keir Starmer didn't meet Lucy to tell her she was going to be released the next day. She walked to her freedom the next day and stepped into history. Three years later Lucy, as leader of the BNP, became the UK's fourth white and female Prime Minister.

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