It is a poor indictment of our private education system that simple arithmetic continues to bamboozle what we are led to believe is the government-in-waiting.
First, shadow home secretary Chris Grayling displayed a failure to master the plus and minus signs when he calculated the violent crime statistics. He must have been a tad heavy on the plus - and perhaps threw in a square root - as he concluded that violent crime had shot up under Labour.
Only that the British Crime Survey showed that the number had shot down. QED.
A further embarrassment occurred this week when the Conservatives declared that 54% of girls in deprived areas became pregnant before they turned 18.
Evidently, for a party that has designs on running the UK economy, mathematics is not its forte. The real figure was 5.4%.
A spokesperson for the Conservatives said they had put the decimal point in the wrong place.
If that wasn't worrying enough, we can only infer that nobody in the party thought to query the 54% figure. Why? Because it pandered to their prejudices. In fact, the number of mothers under 18 has fallen in the past 10 years, which shows how out of kilter the party is with mainstream society.
Perhaps whoever was responsible for allowing the figures to be published should have consulted their fellow Tories embedded in that reality TV show, I'm a Council Tenant, Get Me Out of Here (see below). Surely, the figure would not have rung true to them, if they were paying any attention.
The Conservatives' mismanagement of statistics is desperate stuff, but - and I seldom resort to paraphrasing Joseph Goebbels - if you lie, lie and lie again, some of the untruths will stick.
That reality TV show I referred to above is, of course, called Tower Block of Commons. Bob Holman's critique is worth a read.
What would Carol Vorderman - the Conservatives' maths guru - have to say about this story?
Yet I commend for comparison Lord Warner's classic miscalculation coupled with an error in attribution of links between Incapacity Benefit and obesity.
Meanwhile, it's interesting to consider the ways that politicians bracket statistics and mask the facts. An online news release on welfare reform, 'Fewer people left behind in the recession' conveniently obscures the numbers of claimants who -- like me -- have won a Level 1 tribunal for entitlement to Employment and Support Allowance. I was even placed in the support group, entitling me to a full £30 a week extra on the basic £64.30 a week.
I won my tribunal on 16 December 2009, backdated to 12 July 2009. Thus the DWP actually owes me many weeks of back money at £30 a week, while the assessments and appeals section of the Disability Benefits Centre is so understaffed that a JobCentre Plus telephone operative has told me: "It's like sandbags down there with the backlog".
And so DWP Secretary Yvette Cooper is not ashamed of the fact that 45% of Employment and Support Allowance claimants (between 27 October 2008 and 31 May 2009, including me) "either left ESA before assessment or are still awaiting assessment." (No figures are given for those who were so seriously ill that they died waiting, nor are figures given for the number of claimants who -- like me -- went from a zero points out of minimum 15 eligibility level, to cross the threshold as a result of tribunal decision.)
And it is particularly ironic that those forced into Jobseekers Allowance claiming have a £5 a week 'earnings disregard' from work of less than 16 hours a week. That is less than the HOURLY national minimum wage, because that 'disregard' has not been updated since 1988.
Meanwhile those on ESA can get up to £93 a week 'earnings disregard' as well as up to £30 a week more than the basic single person over-25 rate of £64.30 a week. And looking for paid work in time of recession -- what kind of liberation is that?