THE wife of a Tory councillor has been arrested after she called for hotels with asylum seekers to be set on fire.
In a now deleted post on Twitter/X, Lucy Connolly, a childminder from Northampton, said: “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.”
She has since apologised for the comments and claimed 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.
The comments were published on Twitter/X just hours after the fatal stabbing of three schoolgirls at a dance class in Southport on July 29.
Connolly is married to Tory councillor Raymond Connolly, vice chair of the adult social care committee at West Northamptonshire Council.
Speaking to the BBC, he said 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 separate post on Twitter/X, 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 Twitter/X, 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.
