Imagine if he'd had a different surname. Shicklgruber perhaps or even Heidler, as it was meant to be spelt. The minor Austrian customs official, father of Adolf, had legally changed his name but the authorities got it wrong and the world ended up with Hitler, a name that would leave an indelible stain on history.

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It somehow seems implausible that an Adolf Shicklgruber or Heidler would have risen to such heights in the 1920s and 1930s. Nor that he'd have been able to plunge the world into such unimaginable depths of depravity.

If Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili not changed his name to Joseph Stalin in 1912, one can't help wondering if he would have ended as one of the most feared dictators of the 20th century. It seems unlikely.

Had the original Trump family name not been changed centuries ago, it's inconceivable everything from buildings to steaks to mobile phones to crypto would be branded "Drumpft".

And it also seems unlikely that other, contemporary infamous race baiter would be so well known now if he were called by his real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. But for some reason the media keeps referring to him by his nom de guerre - or should we say alias? - Tommy Robinson.

Worse, their reporting is arse about when almost universally referring to the convicted criminal as "Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon". Far better surely to refer to him as "Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name of Tommy Robinson", as a letter writer to The Guardian UK suggested back in May.

"Tommy Robinson" has far more working class cachet than the far right extremist's softer hyphenated name which, perhaps unfairly, sounds a bit too toffy. Whipping up a flag-waving mob's dander when you have a hyphen in your surname is harder than doing so when your name carries a bovver-boy resonance.

But Tommy Robinson wasn't the first pseudonym Yaxley-Lennon employed. As his foray into race politics kicked off in 2009, he briefly called himself Wayne King, doubtless thinking better of it when the play on words was turned back on him.

The Robinson moniker was appropriated from a Luton Town football hooligan organiser. It's calculated branding, which the media should not be abetting, especially given its toxic intent.

At least our own far-right firebrand has the honesty to go by her real, if married, name: Pauline Lee Hanson (nee Seccombe, formerly Zagorski). As my linguist father-in-law pointed out yesterday, Hanson's Christian name has a multicultural etymology. Pauline is a feminised French derivation of the Latin name Paullinus, which in turn is derived from the word paulus, which means small........

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