I think of it as my moral compass. It tells me where madness lies. In this, the Mail is infallible. If there is a prejudice suitable to a white, middle-class, middle-income, middle-aged, middle-brow audience the old Forger’s Gazette will find it, amplify it, extrapolate from it, and offer it as a free cut-out-and-keep poster. Then an editorial will explain why loathing and dread are excellent news for house prices.

The Mail has a knack, a mad genius if you like, for discovering a panic where none before existed. This paper could put the fear of God into God. It thrives by worrying its readers into a state of burbling hysteria. It is a lynch mob with a letters page attached.

Hence the need to “take” the Mail now and then, like a homeopathic remedy. Just a touch of that poison will see me right. And once I know what’s on those tabloid minds I can tell which way the prevailing wind is blowing. From the sewage farm, generally speaking.

There is a vexed question, nevertheless, concerning the Mail. Does it pander or procure? Is it a mere innocent mirror to the howling savage lurking within the average hard-pressed taxpayer, or does it plant a few notions in the spongy soil of public opinion as it wends its merry way?

The question is fairly interesting and quite important. You could end up believing, for example, that several million mostly literate people – people you know, people you might meet without a net and a tranquilliser – are suckers for any fantasy placed beneath their hyperventilating noses. That’s an uncomfortable thought, but there are worse.

One is that the people who produce the Mail – I’ve known some; you wouldn’t guess just by looking – understand exactly what they are about. Which is to say that they calculate the effect of their work. And since their work seems designed to make the reader uneasy, resentful, angry, afraid and inclined to vote Conservative as often as the law allows, this isn’t a case of journalism being confused with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Try a little test. How easy do you think it would be to create a controversy around the naming of a new-born baby? How anxious could you make people over the perfect cliche of unsullied human ­innocence? Not simple, is it? It takes ingenuity, lots of ingenuity, and a heart, if located, chilly enough to reverse global warming. In fact, the sort of person capable of such a thing often finds himself denounced as a beast in the pages of the Daily Mail.

Max Hastings is no beast. The former Telegraph editor is a knight of the realm, and careful to draw us away from any other conclusion in his robust prose. When Sir Max worries over something he is concerned only because certain people might seize on certain claims and begin to say certain things. Sir Max is a columnist – a filthy habit – who merely reports the claims and remarks on the things people might, just conceivably, say.

Got that?

Last week, Hastings addressed this headline question: “Mohammed is now the third most popular boy’s name in England. So why this shabby effort to conceal it?” In fact, officially, according to the Office of National Statistics, the third most common name, excluding variants, given to boy children south of the Border is Thomas. But any slight hope that Sir Max was about to demand celebrations for the increasing prevalence of little Mohammeds was soon dashed.

It cut no ice, not in the Hastings veins, that the name is spelled in several different ways and therefore fails to appear in a list headed by Jack, Oliver, Thomas, Harry, Alfie and Charlie. Instead, the list is “deceitful”. The non-appearance of Mohammed shows why “in recent times we have been given plentiful cause for paranoia about attempts by official bodies to conceal from us information about the changing face of Britain which our rulers know that many people will not like”.

From here, like a heavy bomber in one of the military histories for which Hastings is known, the argument took wing. That simple list of kids’ names, that bit of statistical fun, seems “designed to mask a simple truth which dismays millions of people, and which politicians and bureaucracies go to great lengths to bury: the Muslim population of Britain is growing extraordinarily fast”.

The columnist did not bother to name the dismayed millions for whom, with a certain patrician assurance, he spoke. I’m guessing he believes they call themselves Tom, Dick or Harry and not Mohammed. Within two paragraphs, nevertheless, we were being told that the Muslim population is “over 3%”, but “growing fast” because those people “have more ­children than the rest of us”.

Us? That’ll be you and me then, Max? Didn’t we meet on the grouse moor? You start the old school song and I’ll join in once I’ve found my tie. Then we can discuss why it is that a “bleak body of pundits, many of them American neoconservatives rather than spokesmen of the British National Party, believe that Europe, and Britain in particular, is threatened by a Muslim tide which will not merely transform its traditional culture but, frankly, bury it”.

Not the BNP? Really? With that detail sorted out we can remind ourselves that this is a respectable argument. If born-again American neocons busy about a clash of civilisations don’t know what’s best for Britain, who does? And can I say how much I admired the “frankly”, too? Nice touch.

But here we are again, with not a hint – in the Daily Mail’s favourite mode – that language is being employed to a – must I say it? – frankly suggestive purpose. Here we are again, too, with a traditional trope in our traditional culture. Foreigners; weird religion; breeding furiously; swamping us with their 3%; and refusing to assimilate, to become like us. Anyone of Irish Catholic extraction who knows a bit of history can fill in the blanks. Anyone with a Jewish heritage can meanwhile note the accumulation of ironies.

Back to those entirely neutral American experts. Apparently they argue, in “a series of recent books”, that Islam “is colonising this continent in a fashion that will render it unrecognisable a generation or two hence”. This “may be overstated” – Max isn’t telling – but that’s not the worst of it. The “statistics paint a grim picture for those of us who do not wish to live in a small island crowded with 77 million people, even if most of the newcomers were white Australian Christians”.

Not the Australians, please. Come to that, can we also be spared a weird foreigner who writes: “It seems fantastically naive to suppose that many of these newcomers – or even their children born here – will start reading Jane Austen or tuning in to The Archers.” They probably won’t be reading the Daily Mail either, Max, but that appears to be of no account. And do I have to change my own name to Mohammed if I confess that I despise The Archers?

It’s true. The antique soap offends my sense of traditional culture. Perhaps I have failed to assimilate adequately. Perhaps all it takes is a Sir Max writing in the Mail to remind me, meanwhile, that those who talk about “we, the old British” are not my people, thanks. So where does that leave us?

Each new group of immigrants to Britain receives the same arid response: that much, at least, is traditional. Each faces the same malign prejudices, the same degree of ignorance. Each is given lectures on British tolerance and is then left to puzzle out of the grim truths of ingrained racism. Hastings writes – but of course – in sorrow, not in anger. He speaks for “many people”, whoever they may be. They are, apparently, “dismayed” by the growth of the British Muslim ­population. Think about it.

Whether or not there is intolerance in Britain, the Mail sees it writ large. “The Muslims are Our Misfortune”: Sir Max didn’t say it, but the historian could probably render it into German for you.