Cllr David Wimble’s Problem With Numbers

When a cabinet member says his party has 76 councillors at Kent County Council, but the official figure is 47, that is not a tiny slip. It is less a rounding error than a full-scale break-in at the warehouse of arithmetic.

There are occasions in public life when a politician says something so gloriously wrong that the facts do not merely correct him; they put on steel-toe boots and chase him round the room. This is one of those occasions.

In an interview with Lembit Öpik, KCC cabinet member David Wimble (pictured) said Kent County Council had 81 seats, which is correct enough. He then set fire to the rest of the abacus. Wimble claimed Reform had “77, I think it was” and now “technically” had 76. He said Labour had two, the Liberal Democrats had 16 and the Conservatives had “four, something around that order”. The trouble is that Kent County Council’s own official pages say Reform UK currently has 47 councillors, not 76, and the council is made up of 80 serving members because one of the 81 seats is vacant. Reform is the largest group by miles, yes. But it has not somehow bred an extra 29 councillors in a back room at Sessions House.

Even allowing for the usual political habit of speaking first and counting later, this was a spectacular effort. Forty-seven is not close to 76. It is not “in the same ballpark”. It is not even standing outside the same sports ground asking for directions. If Wimble had said 57, one could at least have seen the ghost of a memory stirring, because Reform did win 57 seats at the May 2025 election before defections, expulsions and other assorted internal ructions reduced the current tally. But 76 is not 57, and 77 is not 57 either. This was not a memory lapse. It was numerical performance art.

What makes the whole thing even funnier is that Wimble has form here. Shepway Vox previously reported him saying, with admirable candour, “Numbers have never been my big thing.” At the time, that sounded like one of those throwaway lines politicians make and hope nobody remembers. Unfortunately for him, it has aged less like wine and more like unrefrigerated prawns. Because one now has to ask the obvious question: how did KCC leader Linden Kemkaran look at a man who publicly admits numbers are not his strong suit and decide that he should be Cabinet Member for Economic Development and Special Projects? Economic development is, to put it mildly, not a branch of interpretive dance. It involves budgets, forecasts, value for money, business cases, regeneration schemes, risk, investment and project oversight. In other words, numbers. Lots of them. Quite important ones, too given KCC is approximately a £2.5 billion pound organisation.

So yes, Kent residents are entitled to laugh. And also, quietly, to wince. Because this is not some bloke in a pub getting the darts scores wrong after four pints of bitter. This is a serving cabinet member at a county council with a vast budget and major responsibilities, publicly speaking about basic political facts inside his own authority and getting them catastrophically wrong. Not marginally wrong. Not technically wrong. Wrong in the sort of way that makes you check whether he dropped a digit, lost a page, or was perhaps trying to count using a raffle ticket and a dream.

To be fair to Wimble, he did get one figure right: Kent County Council does indeed have 81 seats. Sadly, from that solid opening, he then embarked on a mystery tour through a parallel universe in which Reform has 76 members, the Lib Dems have 16, the Conservatives have four-ish, and reality is apparently something that happens to other people. The official picture is far less exotic. KCC’s current composition is headed by Reform on 47, with the rest spread across Liberal Democrats, Labour, Conservatives, Greens and breakaway or independent groupings, plus one vacant seat. Whatever else can be said about the chamber, it is not 76 shades of Reform.

And that, in the end, is the point. Nobody expects politicians to be human calculators. But voters are allowed to expect a cabinet member for economic development to know the difference between 47 and 76, especially when he is talking about his own side. If “numbers are not my big thing” was meant as a bit of self-deprecating charm, it has now hardened into something more like a public-service announcement. Handle claims with care. Check against official figures. Keep away from spreadsheets.

Because when a man in charge of economic development cannot count his own councillors without summoning 29 imaginary colleagues out of thin air, it does rather suggest that numbers are not merely “not his big thing”. They may, in fact, be an active and ongoing grievance.

The Shepway Vox Team

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