Susanna Reid and Nadine Dorries Clash Over Lucy Connolly on Good Morning Britain
A fiery exchange erupted on Wednesday morning’s edition of Good Morning Britain, as host Susanna Reid confronted former Conservative MP Nadine Dorries over the controversial figure Lucya Connolly.
The heated debate, which also involved co-host Ed Balls attempting to mediate, centred on Connolly’s recent appearance at the Reform party conference.
Reid, 54, didn’t hold back when raising the matter of Connolly, who was jailed for inciting racial hatred following a social media post made in July 2023, the day of the Southport stabbings.
Connolly has since been released from prison and drew attention for attending Dorries’ new political venture.
When pressed, Dorries, 68, defended her decision to join Reform: “I don’t call her a convicted criminal! It’s a new party, well, Reform is the same thing Nigel has been saying for 30 years, banging the same drum, didn’t decide on a policy because it wanted to win votes, and I felt a relief to be in a party with other people who share those views.”
Reid challenged her firmly: “But you were in the Online Safety Bill! It didn’t give you any sort of shiver that someone was at your conference who was convicted of inciting hatred online?”
The debate quickly grew tense, with both women talking over each other. Dorries responded: “Absolutely not! In the case of Lucy Connolly, if you want to talk about that we can, but I think we’ll use up all our time-“
Reid interrupted again: “No, specifically Lucy Connolly…”
Dorries remained unflinching, even as Balls attempted to steer the conversation to calmer waters.
She argued: “I felt what we saw with Lucy Connolly was a severe reaction to a woman who took down a tweet, and we’ve all posted, Ed, tweets, that we shouldn’t have done.
It was in the aftermath of an attack where young girls had been murdered.”
Further defending her stance, Dorries added: “I don’t brush off people who have been incited in courts of law. But I think there was a whole issue at the time, this was a long time ago now, of two-tier policing.
Lucy Connolly was made an example of, I think the time she spent in prison was extraordinarily long for what she’d done, the tweet she’d deleted. I think it’s unfair she was singled out in that way. There was plenty of stuff on social media in that day.”
Connolly had served 10 months of a 31-month sentence after posting: “set fire to all the f****g hotels full of the b**** for all I care” online.
Dorries concluded her remarks: “If we’re going to put someone in prison for putting a tweet out, what I want to see is equality and fairness and meritocracy. I don’t want to see I’m not sure what the purpose of this is…”
The exchange marked one of the most heated moments on the ITV breakfast show this year, drawing strong reactions on social media as viewers weighed in on both Reid’s insistence and Dorries’ controversial defence.
