The wife of a high-ranking Conservative Party councillor has been arrested for racial hatred following a disgusting social media post put out in the wake of the Southport stabbings.
In a now deleted post on her X account, Lucy Connolly, who’s from Northampton, wrote: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f* hotels full of the b** for all I care… If that makes me racist, so be it.”
The childminder has since apologised, and said she had acted on “false and malicious” information.
Connonlly was arrested on suspicion of racial hatred and remains in custody, Northamptonshire Police had confirmed.
She published the comments on her X account, formerly Twitter, hours after the fatal stabbing of three schoolgirls at a dance class in Southport on 29 July.
Connolly is married to Tory councillor Raymond Connolly, who is vice chair of the committee on adult social care at West Northamptonshire Council.
He told the BBC his wife made one “stupid, spur of the moment tweet out of frustration and quickly deleted it”.
“She’s a good person and she’s not racist,” he said.
“She’s got Somalian and Bangladeshi kids she looks after and she loves them like they’re her own”.
In a post on X this evening, Mrs Connolly said: “I am someone who cares enormously about children and the similarity between those beautiful children who were so brutally attacked, and my own daughter, overwhelmed me with horror, but I should not have expressed that horror in the way that I did.
“This has been an invaluable lesson for me in realising how wrong and inaccurate things appearing on social media can be.”
In a post on its X account, the childcare listing site, Childcare.co.uk, said an Ofsted registered childminder who had an advert on its platform had been suspended following information received about a highly inappropriate tweet.
Related: Farage says he was misled by Andrew Tate over Southport attacker
