THIS is a riposte to an article in Fraser Nelson’s Notebook headed ‘The truth about Lucy Connolly’s sentence: Her judge was following a flowchart the Tories built, to the letter’ on May 29, 2026.
YOU JUST don’t get it, old chap. You have spent 2,000 words meticulously explaining how a young mother ended up in prison for a tweet, and somehow concluded that the real scandal is criticism of the judge.
No. The scandal is that a mother ended up in prison for a tweet.
Your article reads like a forensic accountant’s explanation of how a company went bankrupt. Every debit is in the right column, every credit in the right column, every procedure followed perfectly. Yet somehow the business is still bust.
The public are angry not because Judge Melbourne Inman KC failed to follow the Sentencing Council guidelines. They are angry because common sense tells them that locking up a woman with no criminal history for words posted online while violent offenders routinely avoid custody feels profoundly wrong.
You say that Shadow Cabinet Minister Chris Philp is attacking judges. I don’t think that’s what people hear at all.
What people hear is that a woman received an immediate custodial sentence for a social media post while, on countless occasions, they have watched burglars, shoplifters, knife carriers, violent thugs and repeat offenders walk from court with suspended sentences, community orders or no charge at all.
You respond with a legal flowchart. The public respond with their eyes.
The problem with your analysis is that it confuses legality with legitimacy. Nobody disputes that the judge followed the rules. Nobody disputes that the Sentencing Council produced guidelines. Nobody disputes that Parliament passed the legislation.
The question is whether the result was insane.
A journalist’s duty is not merely to explain how the machine works. It is to ask whether the machine is producing absurd outcomes. You write as though proving that every cog turned correctly somehow settles the matter.
It doesn’t.
If Parliament passed a law tomorrow mandating three years in prison for insulting a football referee on X, and a judge dutifully imposed exactly that sentence, would we all shrug and say, ‘Well, the guidelines were followed’?
Of course not. We would rightly conclude that the system itself had lost its senses.
You acknowledge that 31 months for a tweet is excessive. Yet after conceding the central point, you spend the rest of the article defending the mechanism that delivered it. That is an extraordinary abdication of the journalistic mission.
The British public are not legal technicians. They are moral observers. They see a justice system that often appears incapable of protecting them from persistent criminals while displaying extraordinary enthusiasm for policing speech. They see shoplifting effectively decriminalised in many areas. They see burglary detection rates in the gutter. They see thousands of crimes filed away without a suspect ever being identified. They see police forces dedicating resources to online posts while admitting they lack resources for other offences.
Then they see Lucy Connolly imprisoned. And you wonder why they conclude something has gone badly wrong.
You accuse critics of promoting a ‘two-tier justice’ narrative. Perhaps the phrase is imperfect. Perhaps it is sometimes misused. But dismissing the underlying grievance is a mistake.
The grievance is not that judges secretly hate white people. The grievance is that the state increasingly appears tougher on the compliant than the dangerous.
The law-abiding citizen with a fixed address, a job, a bank account and a social media profile is easy to find. The career criminal who lives off-grid, ignores court orders and accumulates dozens of convictions is much harder. The result is a system that often looks strongest where resistance is weakest.
That perception is not irrational. It is rooted in lived experience. Indeed, you inadvertently make the point yourself when you acknowledge that motorists exceeding speed limits by a few miles per hour face almost certain punishment while many other crimes go unsolved.
Exactly. The public are observing a pattern.
What frustrates readers is that establishment commentators often seem more interested in correcting the vocabulary than confronting the reality.
You tell us why the sentence happened. Fine. But the real question is why a civilised country ever created a framework in which it could happen at all. The fact that the Tories helped build that framework is no defence. The fact that Labour now administers it is no defence either. The fact that judges are required to apply it is certainly no defence.
When ordinary people see a mother jailed over a tweet while violent offenders escape custody, they do not reach for the Sentencing Council handbook. They conclude that the priorities of the system are upside down.
And for once, old chap, they may have a point.
