State painted Lucy Connolly as a thug - her treatment shames Starmer's Britain

Lucy Connolly has been to hell and back. Apart from the crippling injustice of being jailed for a single tweet, she was manhandled in jail, and forced onto a prison wing known as "The Bronx" where the most violent inmates are held. She's been battered and bruised. She has lived in terror of what might happen next because two prison officers told her they'd been warned by the "authorities" to "watch out for her because she could be violent".

This about a woman who's never had a fight in her life; has no convictions for anything; is the wife of a respected ex-Tory councillor; who has spent years grieving the tragic death of her 19-month-old baby thanks to a hospital cock-up - hence her devastation at the deaths of those Southport girls and her subsequent tweet.

But not content with jailing her, the State was determined to paint her as a thug who needed to be kept under control. During her year in prison, she's been denied the privileges other prisoners got. Her appeal for early release was also denied, along with repeated requests for day release, which makes it sound like the authorities were further trying to persecute her.

Back home, Lucy's husband Ray is skint thanks to rocketing legal bills and he's had to sell the family car because he's without Lucy's salary. But the person who's suffered most - and may never get over what happened - is the couple's daughter, Holly, who was 12 when her mum was slung in jail.

And Holly and her mum are Keir Starmer's and Attorney General Lord Hermer's shame. Not least because in 2013, when he was director of public prosecutions, our hypocrite PM said leniency should be shown to people who swiftly deleted tweets and showed remorse. Lucy Connolly did both. And don't forget the dangerous Lord Hermer personally approved Lucy's prosecution.

Are these two political bullies proud of what they did? Would like their own kids to go through what Holly Connolly has? Or don't they care? Did they just want to make examples of those they'd branded far Right and whose opinions on immigration they didn't like?

Yes, Lucy's hastily deleted tweet was vile ("set fire to all the f***ing hotels and all the b*stards in them") but when she said it, the killer was believed to be an illegal boat migrant. But that tweet didn't deserve a 31-month sentence. Not when some members of grooming gangs who pleaded guilty to rape got less. Not when toe-rags like Salman Iftikhar, who threatened an air hostess with gang rape, was given just 15 months. Not when child rapist Rees Newman avoided jail because the prisons were full.

Holly Connolly probably doesn't know about all of that. She just knows how sad and lonely and empty her life has been since her mum's been behind bars. She's also, courtesy of her mum, become a cause célèbre - something no 12-year-old needs - and we cannot know how much mental angst or damage that may have caused.

Are Starmer and Hermer proud of that? Are they happy at having devastated a sweet, loving family - maybe forever? The fact is Lucy Connolly was singled out for punishment because of her right-wing views on immigration and I hope that when she tells her story she will humiliate, embarrass and expose this Government as the incompetent bunch of ideologues they are - ideologues who'll destroy decent people who dare to contradict their views on immigration.

Jailing Lucy Connolly is one of the biggest own-goals of this Government's shambolic reign. It has shown it to be exactly what it is - a bunch of totalitarian tossers aggressively pushing for state censorship in order to crush free speech. And they're prepared to bend any law, inflict any cruelty to make that happen.