The numbers game

The BBC's James Cook was tweet-reporting from the London protests yesterday, sending these forth into the world:

• Outside parliament, police have stepped in to separate the main large anti-Trump crowd from a small counter-demonstration in favour of President Trump and Israel.
• There’s now a very large and loud crowd in front of the Houses of Parliament chanting “Donald Trump’s not welcome here”.
• I have spent all day on the streets of London. We struggled through throngs of anti-Trump protestors, many tens of thousands of them. I also saw tiny handfuls of Trump fans. This is not fake news. We have the pictures.
• Tens of thousands of people thronged the streets of central London today, protesting against President Trump's state visit to the UK.

Not everyone believed him:

• I counted them out, I counted them all back, then I made up a number.
• BBC doing a Falstaff again. It's gone from their earlier claim of "hundreds" to "tens of thousands" according to the BBC's James Cook
• I’m in Westminster now.  “Many Tens of thousands”!  Try getting out of White  Hart Lane at the end of a game to realise that this claim as just as ridiculous as Trump’s
  .

And someone spotted a turn of phrase in one of James's tweets that suggests the BBC man might have been slipped in a dig at the President:

"Tiny handfuls". I see what you did there James!