“The reason I’ve come here to talk about maths is not just because I like maths!” Rishi Sunak was explaining to us that sums can be fun. This was an uphill task, but he was going about it with the enthusiasm of a teacher trainee who’s just seen Dead Poets Society for the first time.

“You can’t make movies without maths!” he gushed. This was relevant because he was speaking at a London sixth form college that specialises in film production. “You can’t make visual effects without vectors and matrices. You can’t design a set without some geometry.” 

It wasn’t that he was wrong: numeracy is a vital skill. But his approach had the air of a fortysomething putting on a leather jacket and sunglasses in an effort to connect with the troubled teens who’d been caught smoking round the back of the youth club. Hey gang, do you know what’s really cool? Differential equations, that’s what! Perhaps he hoped that at the end of the speech the student audience would all stand on their desks and start chanting the prime numbers between 1 and 100.

Did you know that you use maths every day in ordinary life? The prime minister does. It’s not all about boring sums, either, he explained. It can be about “calculating the angles of free kicks or the speed of a Formula One car!” Wow, Mr Sunak, you’re right! Maths really is whizzo and hip! I’m going to stop talking smack and go and do my homework right now!

To be fair to the prime minister, if you’d spent the last eight years surrounded by Tory MPs, you’d probably think there was something wrong with the nation’s schools, too. Later, they would be gushing in Parliament over the CPTPP trade deal, estimated to boost Britain’s economy by 0.08 per cent. On the other hand the Brexit deal they also love is expected to hit GDP by 4 per cent. One of these numbers is bigger than the other, but see if you can get a member of the Cabinet to tell you which.

Or to take a question from this summer’s GCSE Maths paper: “Rishi leads a party that is polling around 30 per cent. Keir leads a party that is polling above 40 per cent. Public sector workers are on strike and no one can afford to heat their homes. You are a columnist who has just typed the words ‘Whisper it, but the next election might not be a foregone conclusion.’ What the hell are you thinking? (Show your working.)”

One clue to numeracy levels around Westminster is the astonished tone in which we are always assured that Sunak knows how to open Excel. He even makes his own spreadsheets! To people who struggle to calculate a percentage, all this makes the prime minister sound like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. The rest of us can reach our own judgements. 

There is, apparently, an “anti-maths mindset”

Sunak has his own views about why numeracy is so poor in the UK. It’s all our fault, and it’s because of the prejudiced way we talk about sums. There is, apparently, an “anti-maths mindset”. I am not making this up. “We make jokes about not being able to do maths,” the prime minister explained. “But we’d never make a joke like that about not being able to read.”

What are we to do about this pervasive chauvinism against times tables? “It’s about us having a conversation as a country,” Sunak said, earnestly. “About us just changing how we approach this. So it isn’t OK to say ‘Well I don’t do maths’ and everyone laughs. That doesn’t happen overnight. All of us have probably, if we’re being honest with ourselves, been in a conversation when that happened.” We appear to have reached the point where the government which denies the existence of racism but wants to police jokes about sums. 

Have YOU, reader, laughed reassuringly when someone said they weren’t much good at maths? Perhaps you thought you were being polite. What you were actually doing was perpetuating bigotry against calculus. I hope you’re appalled at yourself. Why not take a moment right now and consider how you’ll respond the next time you’re in that situation? Maybe just get up and walk away, to make it clear that you will have no part in the narrow-mindedness that is arithmeticism. Or, if you have the confidence to call out innumeracy, stand up, and tell the numberphobe in a loud voice: “Shame on you, to the power of ten!”