Rhys McDonald’s troubling experience began with an unexpected call at work from his mother in August 2024, informing him that the police had contacted her and urgently wanted to see him. He had no inkling about the reason for this summons.

Within hours, officers had handcuffed him, taken him to his local station and locked him in a custody cell.

It was the 35-year-old’s first spell of incarceration – but the long months that lay ahead of him were set to be infinitely worse.

In what became an extraordinary ordeal in prison, McDonald, a gentle father of one, endured being spat at, receiving death threats, racial abuse for being white, and fearing for his safety to the extent that he had to lock himself in his cell for up to ten days at a stretch.

Just two days after his mother’s alarming call, McDonald found himself in the magistrates’ court, still dressed in his work attire, charged with the offense of ‘publishing written material to stir up racial hatred’.

This coincided with the intensely charged summer of widespread protests triggered by the horrific murders in Southport of Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, who were just six, seven, and nine years old, respectively, at the hands of Axel Rudakubana, a British youth of Rwandan descent.

Prosecutors argued that the chaos that ensued—resulting in hundreds of injuries, looting, and arson nationwide—was incited by false claims on social media alleging the murderer was an illegal immigrant. Keir Starmer vowed prompt legal actions, emphasizing that those inciting online unrest would come to regret their involvement.

So what did Mr McDonald actually say? The court heard that his friend, Christopher Taggart, 37, had written on Facebook: ‘Who’s up for a rally?’

McDonald replied that they needed to march ‘with torches and pitchforks’, adding: ‘They need to protest at the hotels where these animals are living.’

Undiplomatic language, certainly. But in the intemperate hours following an atrocity that had convulsed Britain, similar sentiments could probably be heard in pubs up and down the country. Many would insist, in any case, that Mr McDonald was hardly inciting violence – and that this was scarcely a matter for the law.

He also made clear in online posts: ‘It’s not about immigration, it’s about an ideology… Sadly due to uncontrolled immigration going on for more than 20 years, in some places this ideology is still embedded… It’s about radical Islam.’

Referring to the ‘animals’ comment, this lifelong Tory voter, who has never attended a political march or been a member of a political party, tells me: ‘I wrote a stupid offensive message on social media – but I never incited anyone to attack anyone.’ He makes it clear he was not calling for people to literally march with pitchforks, insisting the phrase was a reference to an episode of The Simpsons cartoon, in which an angry mob chase Homer Simpson.

Nevertheless, with the Prime Minister himself urging the courts to throw the book at anyone and everyone, Mr McDonald’s lawyers advised him to plead guilty for a reduced sentence. ‘It all happened so quickly,’ he says.

In the event, this aircraft fitter, who had no criminal record, was dumbfounded to receive a 28-month sentence – more than two years – for that brief social media post.

Mr Taggart received 32 months – almost three years.

Nothing could prepare Mr McDonald for the fear and intimidation that awaited him in prison – a dystopian nightmare from which he is only just recovering.

He served a total of 50 weeks, but it was in his third jail, Stoke Heath in Shropshire, that his problems really began. The prison, which was built in 1964, was found in a recent report to be seriously overcrowded, with up to 784 inmates.

At Stoke Heath he quickly discovered a worrying fact. He tells me: ‘The authorities had moved me to a prison which appeared to have a dominant black and Asian population. Was it to teach me a lesson? Another punishment?’

Other inmates soon discovered why Mr McDonald was inside. Not only were the prisoners’ names and photos on the doors of their cells, but he learnt that many of the black and ethnic-minority inmates had closely watched trials such as his, related to the Southport killings. They had even gathered newspaper cuttings and photographs of the likes of Mr McDonald.

‘They were on to me,’ he says. One day when he was working in a prison workshop he looked up. A large inmate, who happened to be black, was staring at him.

This man then spat in Mr McDonald’s face, saying: ‘This is just the start of it. You have no idea what we do to racists.’

He then picked up on the prison grapevine that a group of inmates, all black and Asian and many of them Muslims, had decided to ‘do him in’ because of his conviction.

His voice cracking with emotion, Mr McDonald tells me: ‘To say I was scared is an understatement. I thought I was going to die. I locked myself in my cell for ten days and would not leave.’

Each day his cell echoed to the relentless noise of fellow prisoners trying to kick the door down. They would slide open the observation hatch in the cell door to threaten him, shouting: ‘Racists must die! You are a marked man! We will stab you! Watch your back!’

He tells me: ‘It went on and on. They told me I was a white trash racist who had to be cut open.’

The prison staff began bringing his meals to his cell, pushed through a hatch so as not to unlock the door. ‘They told me not to provoke the situation and if I was attacked not to fight back because it would make matters worse. No one was helping me. I was a nervous wreck.’

He often cried himself to sleep worrying about his family and especially his son ten-year-old son Freddie. ‘I wondered if I’d ever see them again.’

Tipping the scales at 16st when he went into prison, when he left he was 3st lighter.

As the effective siege continued, the prison staff threatened to remove privileges such as his TV if he did not leave the cell during the ‘socialising period’.

‘I said to a senior prison officer: “If I leave, I am going to get hammered [beaten up].” He said: “You should have thought about that before you were p***ing about in Southport.” I haven’t been to Southport since I was a schoolboy! The prison staff didn’t have a clue what I had actually done. They seemed to think I was one of the rioters burning cars.’

Eventually, with the help of some sympathetic warders, Mr McDonald managed to convince his fellow inmates that he was not a racist and that the social media posts that had put him in jail were about illegal migrants.

‘I made the point some [illegal migrants] came from Somalia. Some came from Poland. It was not anti-black or brown.’

When he eventually came out of his cell he pointedly avoided contact with anyone who was not white.

‘Ironically I was acting like a racist. I walked with my back to the wall so I could see people all the time. I was on high alert. They told me to watch my back. Trust me, I did. I went back to my cell as soon as I could and locked it.’

Mr McDonald is speaking to me in the five-bedroom terrace house in Runcorn where he grew up. He’s been living there with his parents Janet, 66, and Glen, 70, since he broke up with his partner following his imprisonment (he had already separated from the mother of his son Freddie).

In the neat house, dogs are barking, GB News is playing on the TV and a plaque on the wall bears the legend: ‘Home is where the heart is.’ As his mother pours us both tea, Mr McDonald tells me: ‘She’s been my rock but it was too much even for her when I called home on Christmas Day from prison. She couldn’t speak to me. She was too upset.’

Freddie visited him regularly. ‘He desperately tried to hide the fact he had been crying when he saw me. He wanted to be brave for his dad. It was absolutely heartbreaking.’

In the first prison, Altcourse in Liverpool, he spent 23 hours a day in his cell, shared with his friend Mr Taggart. He was then transferred to HMP Liverpool, where he was jailed with violent offenders including two murderers serving 35 and 45 years respectively.

The prison where he was targeted by the gang, he said, stank of the synthetic marijuana ‘spice’, which can cause psychosis.

‘It’s tolerated because it puts some of the inmates into a numb state. One bloke was off his head four nights running, needing medical help. I would hear the drones dropping off the stuff over the prison walls all night. It was like an airport.’

Eventually he was moved to an open prison for the last four months of his sentence. On his release, he discovered he had lost his job. ‘It’s hard to get an interview if you have a criminal record associated with Southport. I’ve always worked. Now I’m unemployed and struggling financially.’

He adds: ‘This experience has made me fall out of love with this country. It’s been devastating. A lesser man might have crumbled. Sometimes I tried to kid myself it was all a terrible dream and Jeremy Beadle was going to jump out with a TV camera and say: “You’ve been framed!” But instead I was living a nightmare, cheek by jowl with drug dealers, sex offenders and murderers.’

A Liverpool football fan, he now says he is too scared to cheer on England. ‘I feel it’s a crime to be a flag-waving patriot in Keir Starmer’s Britain. I feel abandoned by my own country. In court they implied I had been threatening to burn down hotels with children inside, which was an outrageous misrepresentation.’

His experience has echoes of Lucy Connolly, 42, the wife of a Tory councillor, who served ten months in prison for tweeting: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s.’ She deleted the tweet within hours of writing it.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage raised Ms Connolly’s case with allies of Donald Trump on a visit to US Congress as ‘a symbol of Keir Starmer’s authoritarian, broken, two-tier Britain’ – and friends of Mr Trump, including Vice President JD Vance, are known to be shocked at her case.

Mr McDonald, who read about Ms Connolly’s case in prison, tells me today: ‘We were both political prisoners.’

While Mr McDonald was in prison, he saw on TV the conviction of Mike Amesbury, Labour MP for Runcorn, for punching a constituent to the ground. Jailed for ten weeks, Amesbury was released after just three days.

‘What he did in a drunken rage was a million times worse than what I did and he was an MP – a public figure. Yet Starmer told President Trump he was “proud” of the tradition of free speech in Britain. I’m living proof that we don’t have that tradition anymore.’

Sarah Pochin MP, who won the Runcorn by-election for Reform after Amesbury’s conviction, visited Mr McDonald in prison.

She has been outraged by his treatment and plans to raise it in Parliament.

‘I was a magistrate for 20 years,’ she tells me.

‘Violent and sex offenders get shorter sentences than my constituent. He would not have got a custodial sentence in my court. Our two-tier justice system has turned this good man’s life upside down. It’s shameful.’

Now Mr McDonald is attempting to rebuild his life. ‘I lost my job,’ he says. ‘I’m on the dole for the first time in my life. I’ve lost my reputation. My relationship ended.

‘I wish I could take back the inflammatory language. But what I went though was like a Soviet show trial.’