A South Hams councillor has been recommended to undergo “code of conduct” training after a council hearing into the way she had treated a member of the public in the wake of a dog festival.
Dartmouth town councillor Gina Coles had said that Heather Nesbit – the organiser of last year’s Woofstock dog show in the town – had lied, in an email to a third party, Helen Brown.
Following a meeting lasting more than 90 minutes, the panel agreed that Cllr Coles had breached the town council’s code of conduct in two ways – by failing to treat someone with respect and courtesy and by bringing her office into disrepute.
But panel chairman Cllr Mike Saltern said the panel accepted that Cllr Coles had been under stress at the time she sent the email, after being confronted with a wave of “negative” and “destructive” social media attacks following the publicity over her comments about the dog show and its organiser.
Cllr Coles had told the panel – made up of three district councillors alongside two independent members – that she was subjected to hundreds of Facebook posts accusing her of being “vile”, “horrible” and “homophobic” from both the USA and the UK, with one telling her they would “whip me and stone me if I didn’t leave town”.
The complaint which led to the hearing centred on an email that Cllr Coles sent to a Ms Brown, referring to Ms Nesbitt in which Cllr Coles said: “I didn’t trust her after she lied to the council.”
The email then found its way to Ms Nesbitt.
Cllr Coles told the tribunal the alleged lie involved a statement from Ms Nesbitt that the Mare and Foal Sanctuary would clear away hay bales and clear up Coronation Park in Dartmouth after the dog show last summer. She claimed she had not called Ms Nesbitt a liar but had simply said she had told a lie.
“She did lie to me and I know that. I was just making a statement that was true,” she told the hearing, after opposing the findings of the council’s monitoring officer that she had breached her own council’s code of conduct.
After the panel upheld the complaint against her, Cllr Coles told them: “I didn’t know that I was doing it. All I was doing was stating a fact that I knew to be true. I am amazed that I can’t do that.”
The code of conduct complaint against Cllr Coles came after a series of stories in the Chronicle, reporting Cllr Coles’s comments surrounding a dog show which went ahead on Coronation Park last August.
Former Chronicle reporter Roger Williams, supporting Cllr Coles at the hearing, launched an attack on the way the newspaper had reported the issue generally and editor Stuart Nuttall in particular.
He claimed Cllr Coles had been “targeted” by Mr Nuttall and the newspaper.
He said he had eventually left the newspaper because of the behaviour of the editor and claimed Mr Nuttall had told him he would “get” Cllr Coles.
He said the newspaper’s reporting had “created a media storm” which led to the social media attacks on Cllr Coles.
Another former Chronicle reporter Karen Perrow, in a statement read out by Dartmouth district councillor Hilary Bastone, said she believed the original Woofstock stories had been run for “sensationalist purposes”. Mrs Perrow, manager of Dartmouth Visitor Centre, said Mr Nuttall had met Cllr Coles and herself at the visitor centre and used quotes from Cllr Coles obtained when she thought they were having a social conversation. “At no time did he say he was working or making notes for a news story,” she said.
Mr Bastone questioned whether the recipient of the offending email, Ms Brown, actually existed and said that Cllr Coles was a hardworking councillor and a hardworking director of the town’s visitor centre.
“It concerns me that an email could continue to ruin someone’s life and we don’t know that that person exists,” he told the panel.
He added: “What proof do you have that this Helen Brown even exists? Has it not been checked out that she actually exists and is not someone using an alias?”
He told the panel as they went out to deliberate: “You will have egg on your face if you find out this Helen Brown does not exist.”
The investigating officer, Simon Mansell, said whether the recipient of the email existed or not was not in question, as Cllr Coles believed they existed when she made the comment.
He said that the conduct onus was greater on a councillor than it would be on a member of the public and said that while Cllr Coles may have genuinely thought she was not calling Ms Nesbitt a liar as such, she had not included any “context” within the email to lead a reasonable person not to think that was what she meant.
Following the finding, Cllr Coles said she did not wish to comment.
Cllr Gina Coles made a series of complaints against the Chronicle and its editor Mr Nuttall to the press regulator IPSO regarding the newspaper’s coverage of Cllr Coles’s comments on Woofstock and Heather Nesbitt. Her complaints were not upheld.