# 182 - Jailed for a Tweet | Lucy Connolly Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-cities-podcast-5840331/182-jailed-for-a-tweet-lucy-connolly Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-cities-podcast-5840331/182-jailed-for-a-tweet-lucy-connolly.md Podcast: [Free Cities Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-cities-podcast-5840331) Published: 2026-05-15T05:00:28+00:00 Episode link: https://fountain.fm/episode/ER6rtwYRUDZmSIgWVZ5r Audio file: https://feeds.fountain.fm/0Mh804AKI3yaq86kDWTp/items/lCiCnKJZSLPUWzc4jV1K/files/AUDIO---DEFAULT---d603f06a-c56a-4ff8-b66f-93a636ecc1a5.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/free-cities-podcast-5840331/episodes/182-jailed-for-a-tweet-lucy-connolly Duration seconds: 4443 ## Resource 12 Months in Peterborough Prison for One Deleted Post - Lucy Connolly is a mother and childminder from Northampton. On the evening of the Southport murders in July 2024, she fired off an angry tweet, regretted it within hours, and deleted it. A week later, two police officers knocked on her door. Twelve and a half months later, she finally walked out of HMP Peterborough. Timothy Allen sits down with Lucy for a conversation about what happens when an ordinary mother becomes a national headline, the deleted tweet, the dawn raid, the magistrate's court video link, the women she met inside, the husband she came home to, and the country that locked her up while telling itself it still had free speech. Lucy is on license until March 2027, which means she has to watch every word she says, including in this conversation. She's not bitter. She's funnier than she has any right to be. And she has a lot to say about what Britain has quietly become. In this conversation: The Southport murders, the deleted tweet, and the week between writing it and the police arriving at the door Why Lucy is convinced her arrest was a political takedown of her husband, a Conservative councillor Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986 β€” and why a tweet became a 31-month prison sentence HMP Peterborough, run by Sodexo, and how a private prison compares to the state-run HMP Drake Hall The women she met inside, including Virginia McCullough, who murdered her parents and lived with their bodies for four years The case of Peter Lynch, the grandfather who died at HMP Moorland after being jailed for the Southport disorder Ricky Jones, the Labour councillor who called for protesters' throats to be cut and walked free Why the police, in Lucy's view, have become politically captured and why serving officers ar… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/free-cities-podcast-5840331/episodes/182-jailed-for-a-tweet-lucy-connolly/transcription-requests` β€” Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-cities-podcast-5840331/182-jailed-for-a-tweet-lucy-connolly.md` β€” Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.