Much has been written about the Daily Telegraph‘s front page interview with Lucy Connolly, conducted by Allison Pearson, but here’s a detail worth unpacking a bit further:
She now believes that cases like hers were used to deflect attention away from the Islamist savagery that took the lives of Alice, Bebe and Elsie Dot at that Southport dance class. “I was so shocked. People appear to be more bothered by my political views than by children being murdered.”
Connolly, infamously, had reacted to news of the Southport murders by writing online “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” – a statement based on the false rumour that the killer was an asylum-seeker. For Connolly’s defenders, the formulation “for all I care” meant that she was merely expressing contemptuous indifference rather than inciting violence, although in context the meaning appears to be that people should not hold back from setting fire to hotels if it achieves the stated purpose of “mass deportation”. As such, the case was prosecuted as a instance of incitement – and the context of widespread disorder was treated as an aggravating factor, comparable to prosecutions for online posts during the 2011 rioting. The prosecution and sentencing are thus perfectly explicable without recourse to a “deflection” claim, and the implied rebuke that what happened to her reflects people being insufficently concerned with “children being murdered” comes across as self-serving and unattractive.
And that’s before we get onto the supposed “Islamist savagery”. This is the theory that the killer, Axel Rudakubana, was motivated by Islamic extremism. The primary basis for this claim is that he had downloaded an al-Qaeda manual and attempted to make ricin, although Pearson’s own pet theory, expressed in response to criticism of the above-quoted detail, is that there is a connection between Rudakubana targeting a Taylor Swift dance class and ISIS targeting Taylor Swift concerts – although it’s not clear what this connection is, given that the Austria plot was not exposd in the media until a week after the Southport massacre. But even if you find this plausible, it remains speculative and Pearson misleads her readers by slipping it into her write-up as if it’s something we all “know” about the incident. The theory has no explanation for why Rudakubana did not identify himself as ideologically motivated in court, or why no evidence of even a superficial identification with jihadism could be found by prosecutors. The simplest explanation for the al-Qaeda manual is that it was consulted as a “how to” guide for someone obsessed with violence and killing.
Ahead of the interview, Connolly was photographed standing between Pearson and Dan Wootton, and the Telegraph and Wootton both boast of having secured her “first” interview. This indicates a dual media strategy, in which Pearson promotes Connolly through the (much squandered) reputational legacy of the Telegraph as mainstream media while Wootton brings her to to conspiracist and alt-right audiences . Wootton’s advocacy of Connolly previously included mocking up a photo of Connolly with facial injuries along with the heading “Lucy Connolly Prison Attack”. This was extrapolated from claims made by Pearson and Reform’s Richard Tice that she had suffered bruising to her wrists from handcuffs. Pearson charactered the incident as “mistreatment”, even though she “slid to the floor” to resist transfer to a different prison wing.
I previously noted Pearson’s own experience of an incitement complaint here.
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