The Lucy Connolly scandal has its roots in the woeful performance of her defence team

The judge who referred to his belief in diversity and inclusion in sentencing remarks was being a plonker but Mrs Connolly's own lawyers must know this was not their finest hour

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

MY FRIEND Allison Pearson, fearless columnist at the Daily Telegraph, has catapulted coverage of the Lucy Connolly injustice back to the top of the news agenda.

Mrs Connolly got a 31-month prison sentence (the last sixty per cent due to be served on a tag at home) for the crime of distributing material with the intention of stirring up racial hatred.

The “material” was a single incendiary tweet sent out on July 29 last year, the day of the mass murder of little girls committed by Axel Rudakubana, the Cardiff-born son of Rwandan migrants.

The tweet stated: “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.”

Mrs Connolly, who had suffered the agony of losing a child some years earlier, then took her dog for a walk and when she returned home some hours later deleted the tweet and sent out messages saying that violence was not the answer.

One particular service Allison performed in her masterly article in the Telegraph was to remind us that the presiding judge, Melbourne Inman, included the following political statement in his sentencing remarks: “It is (a) strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive.”

That un-nuanced mantra is his opinion, shared by Sadiq Khan and countless others on the liberal left. Yet it is not my belief, or the belief of millions of other Brits. We think excessive diversity is in fact a weakness, in danger now of balkanising Britain, while the religion of “inclusion” often results in anti-meritocratic decisions that demoralise people striving to succeed.

Anyhow, these issues are obviously irrelevant to the case. It is wrong to deliberately stir up racial hatred, especially at a time of heightened tension. That’s the crime. It’s just that the judge’s irrelevant platitude raises the suspicion of ideological bias from him.

So you might expect me now to launch full in on judge Inman, blaming him for the flagrant injustice suffered by a good woman, doting mother and wife, pillar of her community getting sent to prison with dire consequences for herself and her family.

But I’m not going to do that. Because in my view, the lawyers who truly deserve bucket-loads of rhetorical manure tipped over them are Mrs Connolly’s defence team, who advised her to plead guilty to the very serious offence of which she was charged. The starting point sentence of such an offence is three years imprisonment.

As Judge Inman noted in his summing up: “In relation to your culpability this is clearly a category A case – as both prosecution and your counsel agree, because you intended to incite serious violence. In relation to harm it is again agreed, correctly, that what you did encouraged activity which threatened or endangered life and therefore falls within category one. There is also further relevant factor in relation to harm in that you sought, and achieved, widespread dissemination of your statement by positing it on social media.”

Well, hold on a cotton-picking minute. Is this correct? My interpretation is that a