As we all know believing Polly Toynbee on numbers, economics, tax, is unlikely to get us very far. She is a polemicist, a very good one, but polemics are’t quite the place to be trying to get facts or balanced worldviews.

So, this is not all that much of a surprise:

And the phenomenal share option taken by Ocado’s top executives amounts to £88m – while the pay ratio from boardroom to average staff wage is a staggering 2,605%, says the High Pay Centre.

Hardly staggering. As the High Pay Centre itself says:

An annual assessment of FTSE 100 pay packages shows that median pay for chief executives fell by 13% between 2017 and 2018. However, the average (median) CEO salary of £3.46 million a year is still more than 117 times that of the average (median) UK full-time worker earning £29,574.

That is, Polly’s claim is that that staggering pay gap at Ocado is less than a quarter of the FTSE100 average. Entirely true that this isn’t what she thinks she’s saying and we don’t expect better anyway. But it is a useful guide to how seriously we should take The Guardian on matters of tax, economics, even arithmetic. For they do have layers of editors, copy is checked before it is printed and none of them grasped the simple error here.

2,605% is 25 or 26 times (depending upon how you want to do it, more or of) which is indeed less than the 117 times that is normal. Yes, of course it’s an error but it’s the sort of error which is revealing of the knowledge of those making it. That then leading to us worrying whether they all understand this point they make:

Public sentiment has always strongly favoured clamping down on tax cheats and making the richest pay their fair share. Any companies profiteering from coronavirus will get short shrift: no better time for the Treasury to abolish avoidance and take in all the money that is due.

Abolish tax avoidance? Meaning, abolish people obeying the tax law, as it is written, as Parliament presumably meant it to be and as HMRC and the courts agree said law should be used? Why would we want to do that?

Or perhaps Polly and The Guardian don’t understand tax or the law just as they have problems with that arithmetic?