Now that I have started to make it a point of analysing the “stories” submitted by Peter Allen – the Daily Mail’s (and God knows who else’s) man in Paris – it’s a case of getting a laugh a minute.

Only yesterday I noticed a rather dramatic headline suggesting that two named terrorists had been on board the Air France airliner which tragically crashed last week; naturally, I scoured the the story – replete with its unnamed sources and quickly-manufactured conclusions – and asked Caroline to have a brief look through what had been written in France. Apart from one solitary article that had been little more than a collection of suggestions, there was nothing to be found.

I am now rather glad that I didn’t provide a link to the original article, as I would have ended up looking like an idiot: the headline has now been amended to Two passengers on doomed Air France jet cleared of links to Islamic terrorism.

“Cleared”? By whom? As far as I am concerned they were never even charged. It was an investigation, Mr Allen – an investigation carried out by professionals, unlike your fine self. Then we have this little nugget:

Posthumous security checks into the backgrounds of the men found that they solely ‘shared the same name’ as known Islamic radicals, even though their bodies have not yet been found.

After unravelling this gibberish, one gets to the nub of the story. They shared the same names. Oh-ho! I have to wonder what these names were – Ahmed and Mohammad, perhaps? Oh dear, following this sort of insane logic we probably have organised terrorist cells in every branch of KFC across the country. The next time you are thinking of getting that chicken meal folks, you should perhaps consider the little-known fact that KFC actually means “Koranic Fundamentalist Cell” and that there is a far more sinister meaning to the name hot wings. And that “Bargain Bucket” is in fact a code name for Ryanair.

Of course, Allen’s drivel is the ultimate example of the tabloid non-story: digest some gossip, write a headline-grabbing story, and then amend it on the fly when the truth starts to filter back. Of course, we all know that if this tragedy was indeed a terrorist attack, the group ultimately responsible would have informed us all by now.

Not that Peter Allen cares about the truth, of course.