For quite a long time, I and the eminent British eminence Max Hastings agreed on many things. Then 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and general Bush warmongering rent us asunder. In 2004 he wrote:

I have spent a lifetime resisting my father’s prejudice, that men who affect beards should be regarded with the gravest suspicion. Yet every time I read the rantings of Mark Steyn about what he perceives as decadent European hostility towards the US, I have to fight down an ignoble sensation that daddy was right.

Five years on, in the wake of the news that Mohammed is the third most popular boys’ name in England and Wales, Sir Max is pondering the thesis of a certain bearded ranter and his chums:

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.
In a series of recent books, they argue that Islam is colonising this continent in a fashion that will render it unrecognisable a generation or two hence.

Alas, he is forced to concede we bleak neocons may have a point. If Max is antipathetic to beards in general as opposed to mine in particular, promenading the streets of an ever more hirsute Britain will sorely try his twilight years.