Making a mountain out of a Mo-hill

The news that the name Mohammed is now one of the most popular boys names in England and Wales - if you include all the variant spellings as one - has been greeted with predictable shrieks of alarm in some quarters.

Max Hastings in the Mail being as good an example of predictability as any I suppose, fulminates against a "shabby conspiracy" to compile statistics one way rather than another. But then we get to the meat of the argument:

The Muslim population is now close to two million, over 3 per cent, and rising fast because Muslim families have more children than most of the rest of us, many of them named Mohammed or Muhammed.

I think he's alarmed. You know what is alarming about all this? It does suggest an astonishing lack of imagination on the part of one small subsection of British society. As for Muslims having more children than me, that is far less of a problem than the fact they may be having more sex than me.

If one were to be consistent, then all the Jacks (still the most popular boys' name) and Johns should really be counted as the same thing. But that would just push it further up the chart.