DARREN LEWIS: 'Puppet-masters are feasting on Lucy Connolly - she doesn't even know it'

Don't be sidetracked by the Lucy Connolly circus - remember instead what she represents.

She is a symbol of the Far Right strategy, powered by Big Tech and aided by sections of the UK media, to systematically stage the kind of racist wipeout here that we are seeing in the US.

Mass deportations, Black and Brown people snatched off the street by masked operatives. Anything resembling a fair way of recruiting, teaching and living ripped up and thrown to one side.

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Connolly is a pawn in the wider strategy to get there in the UK. She always was.

So there’s no point naming the attention seekers on social media falling over themselves to get her in front of a camera and a microphone.

You know who they are, you know what they are up to.

You know who SHE is too. Before her tweet calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire, the court heard Connolly had sent others, described by Judge Melbourne Inman as ‘racist’.

They included the one where, responding to an anti-fascist protest, she wrote: “I take it they will all be in line to sign up to house an illegal boat invader then. Oh sorry, refugee.

“Maybe sign a waiver to say they don’t mind if it’s one of their family that gets attacked, butchered, raped etc, by unvetted criminals.”

And yet there was still something sad about the middle-aged mum, blinking like a rabbit in headlights as selfish, agenda-driven narcissists claiming to have her best interests at heart feasted on her.

It is one thing venting on X as “a nobody from Northampton”, as Connolly describes herself.

It is another to be thrust centre-stage as a martyr for the Far Right cause.

Reform xenophobe Nigel Farage is said to have welcomed her to a ‘pre-arranged rendezvous’ with the words: “You are now a symbol of Keir Starmer’s authoritarian, broken, two-tier Britain.”

Whether she’d been coached to say what she eventually did in her interviews, you decide. But she delivered on the extremists’ checklist demanded of her.

She brought home the headline-grabbing bacon with her claim she’d been Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘political prisoner’.

She appeared unable to decide whether she pleaded guilty because she wanted to be home with her little girl for Christmas or because she’d been given poor legal advice.

She failed to spot the irony - or her own brass neck - in her claims that would lead the news agenda, that she’d been denied her right to free speech.

And her supporters strained every sinew to dress her and her 380 days in jail up as a cross between Papillon, Nelson Mandela and John Coffey, the guy from the Green Mile.

In Hollywood they call it a reimagining. And delusion oozed from the heavy lifting to frame Connolly’s racism as legitimate discourse from a concerned mum.

To be fair, she didn’t indulge claims she’d been treated unfairly compared to suspended Labour councillor Ricky Jones.

He’d shouted “they are disgusting Nazi fascists. We need to cut all their throats and get rid of them all” at a protest during the Southport riots last August. He also drew his finger across his throat as he spoke.

But Connolly clearly knew that he’d believed totally in his innocence and pleaded that way.

She didn’t. Probably because the court was told that the day before she was arrested, Connolly sent a WhatsApp message saying the “raging tweet about burning down hotels has bit me on the arse”.

She also claimed she’d “play the mental health card” if arrested, and deny responsibility for her incriminating post if asked.

So it's hard now to swallow her claims she’d been manipulated by the justice system.

That said, it is Connolly and so many others being exploited by the puppet masters, pulling their strings and revelling in their racism.