Why don’t all these disaffected Brits convert to Christianity instead?

So, it seems that Lauren Booth, sister-in-law to Tony Blair, isn’t so much a slightly tiresome attention seeker as bang on trend. By converting to Islam, as she very publicly did last year, she’s put a face to the growing numbers of white Britons who have become Muslims, a group that last week was estimated at 100,000. Her scapegrace father, Tony Booth, unhelpfully suggested that because her mother was Jewish, the conversion didn’t really count, but it would be hard to make that argument stick.

Actually, when I say 100,000, that’s just the figure that an organisation, Faith Matters, put on the trend last week. It follows a separate report by the US-based Pew Forum, which said that there are, in fact, 2.9 million Muslims in Britain, a hefty increase from the 1.6 million in the 2001 census. But we’ll have to wait until the entire Pew Forum report is published to work out whether they’re attributing this to conversions or to undercounting at the last census, which would be my own instinctive assumption.