Susanna Reid clashes with Reform's Nadine Dorries over Lucy Connolly in furious row on air

Susanna Reid has clashed with Nadine Dorries on Wednesday's edition of Good Morning Britain over in a debate over Lucy Connolly. The journalist, 54, was back in her usual slot hosting the ITV breakfast show alongside Ed Balls when they were joined by Nadine. 68, to chat about her time moving over to the Reform party.

Susanna instantly brought up the topic of Lucy, a woman jailed after being charged with inciting racial hatred over a tweet she posted on the day of the Southport stabbings in July 2023. Lucy has since been released from prison and appeared at the Reform party conference.

When asked about this, Nadine said: "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."

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Susanna hit back: "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 two began talking over each other and Nadine hit back: "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-" Then Susanna interrupted again to say "No, specifically Lucy Connolly..."

But Nadine would not back down, even when Ed Balls weighed in on the topic, and she said: "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."

Ed continued to bring up the subject, and Nadine said: "I'm not sure what the purpose of this is.."

She then explained: "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."

Lucy served 10 months of her 31 month sentence after writing "set fire to all the f*****g hotels full of the b***** for all I care" on social media. Susanna asked Nadine if she was 'happy' to be on stage with a convicted criminal.

Nadine added: "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. What I don't want to see are individuals targeted, teams of thought police knocking on doors.

"I don't wanna see young mothers as the person who is chosen. I'd like everybody who incited racial hatred on that day to be behind bars, but that isn't the case. One woman was."

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