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The alternative take on this – that Muhammad tops the chart – was one given by the Daily Mail in their reporting of the official statistics earlier this year. Their reasoning was as follows:

"When all the variations are added together, including Muhammad, Mohammed and Mohammad, the name comes out top with 7,445 counts."

If you do that though, it’s only fair to add together the variations of other names. For example, Oliver and Ollie (7,749) or Harry and Henry (9,136). We can only wonder why the Daily Mail didn’t.

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But it's not quite the same thing, is it? If you name your child "Olyver" or "Hennree" maybe your choice should be lumped in with the regular "Oliver" and "Henry," but "Harry" and "Ollie" represent distinct choices, sort of like "Mahmoud" or "Mehmet" (sort of, roughly, I can't say for sure), so the Daily Mail may not be wrong after all.

It is no 1 ONLY if you include variants. Which you can do with any name, which shows up how inane this ‘fact’ is.

One fact is that out of approx. 775000 UK births in 2013, 7400 were named Mohammed or variants. That’s ONE PERCENT of all births.

The idea that this Mohammed is no 1 ‘fact’ means the UK is a conquered Islamic state is a nonsense. no more than the biggest US name being Pedro would mean the US is now a Hispanic state. The UK remains a nation where 96% of the population are NOT Muslims, and only 8% of the population have any ‘ethnic’ origin. And where Muslims aren’t even the largest UK ethnic group.

Mehmet is the Turkish version of the name Mohammed/Muhammad. I believe Mahmoud is an entirely different name.

There is a town called Mahomet in Illinois, but I've been told it is an American Indian name in origin ("Mahomet" used to be a common spelling in English for the name of the founder of Islam).