David Wimble and the long trail of false claims and official corrections

For years, David Wimble (pictured) has mixed life as a councillor with life as a publisher. That is not the problem. The problem is what happens when the man with the newspaper keeps being corrected by the people he is writing about — and the taxpayer ends up funding the tidy-up.

There are politicians who spin. There are politicians who bluster. And then there is the rarer specimen: the councillor-editor whose copy appears to generate so much corrective paperwork that local government ought perhaps to start charging by the paragraph.

David Wimble is not a minor character in local public life. He is currently Kent County Council’s Cabinet Member for Economic Development and Special Projects. He is also a Folkestone & Hythe District councillor for New Romney, and New Romney Town Council’s own website lists him among its councillors while also identifying him as both the district councillor for New Romney and the county councillor for Romney Marsh. Companies House links him to The Looker Newspaper Ltd and Feel Good Radio Ltd. The Looker’s own about us page says he started the paper in 2009 “having never had any formal experience in publishing”. That last line is meant, one assumes, as an origin story. With the benefit of the documentary record, it reads more like a warning label.

This matters because the issue is not whether Wimble is entitled to opinions. Of course he is. The issue is whether a man who operates a local newspaper while sitting across several layers of local government can be trusted to distinguish opinion from fact with anything approaching professional care. On that score, the paper trail is grimly entertaining.

In 2017, the New Romney Town Clerk appeared to spend an inordinate amount of time pinning notices to parish boards correcting fake news published in David Wimble’s Looker. One example came in July 2017 under the wonderfully weary heading “More Fake News??” The notice was issued after The Looker claimed the council had ignored emails about the possibility of a weekly market on St Martin’s Field and suggested a market company had approached the council directly. The council’s answer was simple: no such company enquiry had been received; only an informal approach from Wimble had arrived; and a reply had been sent the same day explaining exactly how to make a proper application. It went on to say that Wimble later made a separate enquiry about ownership, and that those separate exchanges had been blurred together in the published story. The notice ended by recording that no formal market application was ever submitted. This was not an argument about opinion or politics. It was the council stating, in plain English, that the published account was wrong.

Then came the bandstand saga. In the council’s detailed written response to Wimble’s questions, the Town Clerk said it had been noted that Wimble was encouraging members of The Real Marsh Watch to ask the same questions he had already asked, and that the council was publishing one consolidated response to save officer time and associated costs. The same document states that 76 per cent of valid consultation responses supported the commemorative bandstand, that no money had yet been spent on planning it, and that Wimble’s social media claim about a legally required recorded vote was “factually incorrect”. Again, the central point is not whether one likes bandstands. It is that staff had to stop and produce a public correction sheet because the story circulating locally was not aligned with the record. Public money was being spent not on a bandstand, but on factual mopping-up.

By February 2023 the pattern had thickened into habit. New Romney Town Council issued a nine-page press release headed “Community Hall, Sports Pavilion and Nursery Project – Information Correction”. Its opening is devastating. It says Wimble had published “a whole raft of factually inaccurate information” in The Looker despite first checking with the Town Clerk, who had provided him with the facts. The correction then proceeds, with the patience of a saint and the tone of somebody unpacking a particularly irritating flat-pack, through the errors: the project started in 2016, not 12 years earlier; the land-sale history had been misstated; the council had not agreed “in principle” to borrow a further £1 million; Synergy’s fees were not “nearly half a million” but just under £102,000 over six years; and the council had spent under £350,000 overall by 31 December 2022. It also says Wimble had never tabled a formal modular alternative and that his claims about delivering one inside six months were not realistic once planning, tendering and associated works were counted. The Looker, meanwhile, declares on page 2 at that time, “Every effort is made by The Looker newspaper to ensure that information is correct”. New Romney Town Council’s answer, in effect, was: not this time. Or the time before.

December 2023 brought more of the same. Another New Romney Town Council correction on the same project said that Wimble’s article in Issue 339 “once again, included a large number of repeated inaccuracies” despite his access to the facts as a councillor and despite the specific corrections already given to him. The council corrected the project timeline again, corrected the suggestion that the town had been waiting on mysterious inaction, and made one especially painful point: the planning application had been moving under delegated authority until Wimble himself called it in, meaning any delay flowing from that route was now down to his own intervention. It takes a special sort of civic confidence to help slow the bus and then write a column complaining that the bus is late.

That same month, the council had to correct him again on the basics of planning law and process. In its notice headed “New Romney Drowning in Chaos Article – Information Correction”, it said The Looker had given readers the false impression that New Romney Town Council had “approved” a 99-home development. The council reminded readers that it is not the local planning authority at all, but merely a consultee; that 87 homes on the site had already been approved by the district council; and that the matter before the town council concerned just 12 additional properties. It also had to correct the wrongly identified chair of the planning committee. These are not obscure technical niceties. A council either has the power to approve a planning application or it does not. A planning committee either has the named chair or it does not. These are the basic bones of the story. Get those bones wrong and the rest is just theatrical padding draped over thin air.

If that sounded like an isolated December clean-up, it was not. In April 2025, the Shepway Green Party published its own correction after, it said, spending more than a month trying to get the editor of The Looker and The Hurricane to print it. The party said the papers (owned by Wimble and who is its editor) had “wrongly claimed” that Cllr Stephen Scoffham had suggested Romney Marsh should be allowed to flood so that it could be “rewilded”, accepted that neither Scoffham nor any of his Green Party colleagues had ever made any such suggestion, and apologised for saying otherwise. More awkwardly still, the Greens said the editor admitted the claim was based only on something a Conservative councillor had told him, yet still refused to publish the correction they requested. By that stage, the pattern was no longer just councils reaching for the mop and bucket. Political opponents were now publicly alleging the same basic problem: an appetite for the eye-catching claim first, and a marked reluctance to set the record straight afterwards.

Nor did the problem stop there. By November 2025, it was being pointed out yet again that his paper was publishing false claims about asylum seekers. Then, in March 2026, The Looker was accused once more of misleading readers over Kent County Council’s debt figures. For a publication that solemnly declares that “every effort” is made to ensure published information is correct, the recurring need for correction begins to look less like bad luck and more like a business model.

And now we come to his 2025 Discosable Pecunairy Interest declarations, where the satire begins writing itself. Under the Localism Act 2011, councillors must register disclosable pecuniary interests within 28 days, including relevant interests of a spouse, civil partner, or a person with whom they are living as if married or civil partnered, so far as they are aware. Section 32 allows sensitive interests to be withheld from the published register if the Monitoring Officer agrees; section 34 makes non-compliance, without reasonable excuse, a criminal offence. KCC’s own Code mirrors that structure. This is not optional tidiness. It is the plumbing of local democracy.

On the face of the 2025 forms, the plumbing leaks and leaks badly. The FHDC declaration dated 29 August 2025 says “Please redact my address”, but in the land section records “None” for him and “None” for any spouse or partner, and marks the interest as not sensitive. The New Romney Town Council declaration dated 9 September 2025, by contrast, says it superseded an earlier form because “there was a change in my interests”, lists “10 Mulberry Court” as his land interest, names a spouse or partner-side business entry, and gives a Romney Marsh Business Hub address under corporate tenancies. KCC’s public register, says the land interest is being withheld as “Sensitive information held under Section 32 of the Localism Act”. Those three positions do not sit comfortably together. In plain English, one register indicates that there is a land interest but withholds it as “sensitive”, another openly declares a land interest, and a third claims there is no land interest at all while at the same time asking for an address to be redacted. That is not transparency. It is administrative charades. The absurdity is compounded by the fact that his address appears to be publicly available elsewhere anyway, including on Companies House and on New Romney Town Council’s own website.

The spouse or partner entries are no tidier. The FHDC form says “NA” in the spouse or partner employment field. Eleven days later, the NRTC form contains a spouse or partner-side entry, “Aquiam Ltd”, but should read “Aquium Ltd”, and says it superseded the May form because of a change in interests. That does not by itself prove misconduct; relationships can begin, change, or become disclosable. But it does raise a very direct question: what changed, when, and were all relevant authorities told within the statutory window? That is the question a Monitoring Officer should answer, not a columnist with a thesaurus and a grievance.

The corporate trail only sharpens the point. Companies House ties Radiowaves Media Ltd to 10 Mulberry Court and Feel Great Radio Ltd to Unit 9, Romney Marsh Business Hub, both addresses that mirror the NRTC declaration. It also shows Wimble as an active director of The Looker Newspaper Ltd and Marsh Media Ltd. In other words, at the very moment the declarations begin rubbing against each other, the underlying company records appear more coherent than the public registers meant to explain them. When Companies House looks like the organised adult in the room, somebody at the council offices should probably sit up straight.

For our part, none of this lands from a clear blue sky. The ShepwayVox archive already includes scrutiny of The Looker’s £19,000 High Street Fund application in 2022, later pieces on Wimble’s “problem with numbers”, and a March 2026 article accusing The Looker of misleading readers on KCC debt. Those titles are not proof in themselves of every allegation ever made against him. But they do show that his reputation to spread false and misleading information and fake news has not emerged overnight. The doubts about accuracy, transparency and arithmetic have been around since 2009.

So where does that leave residents? Not with a verdict on Wimble’s soul. We do not need one. It is enough to say this: when a councillor who owns a newspaper keeps being formally corrected by the very bodies he reports on, and when his own declarations raise questions that deserve formal reconciliation, residents are entitled to stop treating the pattern as colour and start treating it as substance. Whether this is fantasy, carelessness or something more cynical is, in one sense, beside the point. The point is the paperwork. The point is the time. The point is the public cost.

For seventeen years David Wimble has written and spoken as though facts are flexible, records are inconvenient, and confidence can substitute for accuracy. Residents do not have to be naive about that any longer. When a man is repeatedly contradicted by documents, repeatedly corrected by councils, and repeatedly leaves taxpayers to fund the clean-up, it ceases to look like eccentricity and starts to look like a way of operating. The issue is no longer whether every claim is merely careless, embellished or invented. The issue is that David Wimble’s public version of events so often parts company with the record that the gap between the two has become a story in itself. In the end, that is his real legacy: not fearless truth-telling, but a mountain of paperwork showing just how often the facts have had to come along behind him and put things right.

The Shepway Vox Team

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