Numbers have never been a strong point for the left. Hence why Owen Jones and his new mate Charlotte Church were pushing the quarter of a million figure for Saturday’s march in London. It’s nonsense.

Even lefties are sceptical:

Saturday's anti-austerity march was impressive but you can't get 250,000 – 3 Wembley crowds – in Parliament Square! pic.twitter.com/oqR3EdorpM — Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) June 22, 2015

While the police will not publicly give a figure, a source tells Guido this morning that Parliament Square can hold around 20,000 people. With a bit of overflow, the working estimate is around 25,000…

250,000 would fill not only Parliament Square but Whitehall and Trafalgar Square too. Twice over.

In order for the comrades to have achieved 250,000 people on their march, 5,000 people would have to have left the starting point at Bank every minute – almost 100 per second – in the time they claimed to have achieved this fantasy number. “A tight military formation couldn’t even do that,” Guido’s public order numbers bod derides.

Are the lefties really saying they had the same number of people who marched on Washington in 1963 at the height of the Civil Rights movement – put at between 200,000 and 250,000:

Is Owen Jones really saying he is a bigger draw than Martin Luther King?

250,000 was also the figure given for Obama’s famous speech in Berlin in 2008:

Notice a difference in the size of the crowd?

This is what 250,000 people looked like when Paul McCartney played in Mexico in 2012.

Shall we look at Saturday’s picture again?

Looks about a tenth of the size… pretty shoddy journalism for the papers to just regurgitate the number given by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity without so much as a raised eyebrow.

UPDATE: Further statistical analysis by Dr Daff points to a figure closer to 17,000: