Here’s a late entrant for the most surprising statistic of the year: the French work longer hours than the British.

That’s right. Despite the 35-hour week, despite the strikes, despite the quality of life, it turns out the average French worker puts in about ten more hours than the average British worker each year.

If you’re surprised by this bombshell, buried in a paper by the international economic authority the OECD earlier this week, you’re not the only one. So was the OECD itself, whose figures had until then depicted a more familiar world where British workers were a paragon of toil, putting in longer hours than the French or the Swiss.

The only problem is: those numbers weren’t quite right. After a lengthy investigation,