Wife of Tory councillor arrested for racial hatred

The childminder has since apologised, and said she had acted on “false and malicious” information

The wife of a Conservative councillor has been arrested after she called for hotels with asylum seekers to be set on fire.

In a now deleted post on her X account, Lucy Connolly, 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.

Northamptonshire Police said a 41-year-old woman had been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred and remained in custody.

Mrs Connolly 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.

The incident prompted a slew of online misinformation, including false claims that the murder suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was a “Muslim immigrant”.

'Spur of the moment'

Mrs Connolly is married to Tory councillor Raymond Connolly, vice chair of the adult social care committee 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 on Tuesday 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.