We combed through the signatories of this morning's anti-Labour Telegraph letter so you don't have to

"100 business chiefs: Labour threatens Britain's recovery," runs the Telegraph's splash today. "This letter is signed in a personal capacity," it notes at the end, in italics.

To find out how much we should all be listening to these business leaders, we decided to put April Fools' Day content to one side and spend several hours trawling through the names to find out exactly who these 103 people (to be exact) - or 0.000158 per cent of the UK's 63.2m population - are.

Starting with the basics, other than the fact that this is such a minute percentage of highly privileged people, we found that the signatories aren't exactly representative of the country's gender make-up:

Secondly, it's worth noting there might just be a bit of political bias going on. Four on the list - Baroness Brady CBE, Baroness Shields OBE, Lord Bamford and Lord Rose - are all Conservative Party peers (Lord Bilimoria is a cross-bencher). Um, hello.

Googling a little deeper, we found evidence that 20 of the signatories are also Tory donors. Considering they've pumped large sums of cash into the party, it's understandable they wouldn't want them to go and lose an election. Hardly headline news.

Labour have subsequently claimed that this list can be extended to 32:

Five others - Surinder Arora, Glenn Cooper, Philip Green, Brent Hoberman and Jonathan Neame - have all sat on advisory boards on various policy matters (see links for details).

Furthermore, at least six others have links to the Conservatives or senior figures within the party. David Cameron was a guest at the wedding of Sir Charles Dunstone, the chairman of Carphone Warehouse. Mark Esiri, the director of NotOnTheHighStreet.com, is a personal friend of the Camerons and used to run Smythsons, the luxury retailer where Samantha Cameron has worked.

Peter Jackson and Steve Varley, senior executives at Travelex and EY respectively, accompanied David Cameron on a private jet as part of a business delegation tour to the Far East.

John Neill, CEO of Unipart, was a member of the Conservative Association at university. Richard Baker works for DFS, founded by Baron Kirkham - a well-known Conservative Party backer, while Moni Varma courted controversy previously after appearing to admit that senior Tory figures had asked him to sign a similar letter before the 2010 election.

Overall, therefore, more than a third (35 out of 103) of the signatories on this anti-Labour letter have some links to the Conservative Party.

As our colleagues over at the Independent also point out, 20 of those on the list were also handed honours by David Cameron in the past five years:

The irony of all this wasn't lost on a lot of people.

Finally, in what could have been somewhat of a giveaway, the Telegraph's poll appeared to have a bit of glitch in it this morning too...

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