A mum who dubbed herself “Keir Starmer’s first political prisoner” has revealed she is meeting members of Donald Trump’s team days after being released from prison for inciting racial hatred with a tweet after the Southport attack. Lucy Connolly, 42, was jailed for stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers online in the aftermath of the Southport murders last year and was released from HMP Peterborough on Thursday. She is the wife of a Conservative councillor.

She revealed on Dan Wootton’s YouTube show on Friday that she is meeting with representatives of the current US government on Saturday. Asked by Wootton what she knew about the meeting, she said: “Not much, just that they’re very interested in the way things are going in the UK, and they are obviously big advocates for free speech, and their lawyers are keen to speak with me.” Asked if she thinks the UK has free speech, she said: “I don’t think so, no.

“And that’s, you know, become increasingly apparent, isn’t it? How many people are still in prison … we need to remember that there was still other people in prison for a similar thing … other political prisoners.

“So I would like Keir Starmer and CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] and any of these people that had a hand in it to tell me exactly what are they achieving by putting the likes of me in prison?”

Mrs Connolly also revealed that she is considering taking legal action against the police after her release from jail.

“That’s something that I will be looking into,” she told The Telegraph. “I don’t want to say too much because I need to seek legal advice on that, but I do think the police were dishonest in what they released and what they said about me, and I will be holding them to account for that.”

She said her words were “massively twisted and used against me” in a statement released by the CPS, which suggested she told officers in her police interview she did not like immigrants.

A press release from the CPS after her guilty plea on September 2 included a quote from Frank Ferguson, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit, which said: “During police interview, Lucy Connolly stated she had strong views on immigration, told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them.”

The former childminder, from Northampton, had pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing “threatening or abusive” written material on X and was jailed at Birmingham Crown Court in October last year.

On July 29, 2024, she posted on X: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bastards for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it.”

She was freed from prison after serving 40% of her 31-month sentence, the automatic release point for her sentence.

Mrs Connolly will remain on licence until the end of her sentence.

Speaking for the first time publicly since her release, she also told Wootton on his YouTube show: “I should never have said what I said. It was wrong. But I am no far-Right activist. I’m no far-Right thug.”

She added: “You’re shutting people’s voices down. It’s ‘let’s give them a label’. Let’s tell them they’re bad people and then they will be quiet.”