Richard Ingrams' Week: Seen the face of Jesus? Must be a slow news day

I remember my friend Derek Jameson, one-time editor of the Daily Express and News of the World, telling me that whenever he had a space to fill he would print a picture of a pizza or the worn sole of a shoe under the headline "Is this the face of Jesus?".

You still see these imagined faces from time to time. But this week there was a variation on the same theme when two papers, the Mail and the Telegraph, ran the same headline "Is this the tomb of Jesus?" over a story about some stone burial casket unearthed in Jerusalem and carved with the names Jesus, Mary and Joseph. They are to feature in a Channel 4 documentary produced by James Cameron, director of the overlong Titanic film.

The headline with a question mark is always a sign that the paper doesn't know the answer and therefore an indication that the story isn't worth reading. In this instance both papers knew perfectly well that the answer to their question was no - as you soon found out if you read the small print. But that hadn't stopped them from running it. The story was not only false; it was also very old, as the existence of these caskets had been known since 1980 when they were first discovered and featured in a BBC film.

But publishers, particularly since the phenomenal success of The Da Vinci Code, have realised that there is a lot of money to be made from what they call "alternative history" about Jesus Christ, however improbable.

Some years ago the firm of Little, Brown brought out a book called The Tomb of God which they advertised at great expense claiming that it contained irrefutable evidence that Jesus was buried on a mountainside in southern France. It was quickly exposed as a fake but Little, Brown refused to withdraw it and made a killing when the book became a bestseller.

History as others want to see it

On the subject of fakes there is still no explanation of the great Himmler hoax which alleged that my father had assassinated him in 1945 on the personal orders of Winston Churchill.

The allegation appeared in the book Himmler's Secret War by Martin Allen, published in 2005. at the time it was shown that the story appeared to be supported by a number of documents in the National Archives at Kew. These documents were later shown to be fakes and not very good ones at that.

Who had put them in the archives and why? Mr Allen denied he had done so himself. Suspicion had arisen because a similar forgery had come to light over Allen's earlier book about Rudolf Hess published in 2003. As Lady Bracknell might have said: "To rely on one fake may be regarded as a misfortune. To rely on two or three looks like carelessness."

A German expert on the subject, Professor Ernst Haiger, who has made a detailed study of the Allen books, points out in an article for the Journal of Intelligence History that Allen is not the only member of his family who is an alternative historian.

In 1983, his father Peter Allen wrote a book about the Duke of Windsor claiming to prove the Duke's close links with the Nazis, including Hitler himself. The evidence relied on a letter from the Duke to Hitler. This too was easily shown to be a fake.

The curious thing about the Allens, father and son, is that nobody seems to know much about them. The blurb on his Himmler book describes Martin as "a leading authority on the Second World War" but gives no biographical information of the kind that publishers usually provide.

Perhaps if the police pursue their investigations at the Kew archive we may eventually be enlightened.

* Tony Blair, as it happens, is himself a keen exponent of alternative history. In part two of Michael Cockerell's Blair trilogy currently showing on the BBC we saw film of Blair accepting the plaudits of the American Congress after September 11, above, and in an emotional speech telling his audience that we all supported the US because they had stood side by side with us during the Blitz.

But as Geoffrey Wheatcroft points out in his welcome diatribe Yo, Blair! (Politicos £9.99), America was actually neutral at the time of the Blitz. Some kind Americans may have been sending food parcels at the time, but that was about all.

Blair has also let it be known that the reason Britain went to war with Hitler in 1939 was not, as had been previously thought, because Germany invaded Poland. The real reason was that for some years Hitler had been persecuting the Jews and that finally we decided that enough was enough and that we had to do something to stop him.

Cockerell's programme was too kind to Blair but it had the merit of showing how very dangerous a man he is - a man determined to set the world to rights, convinced of the justice of his cause and convictions. What makes him more dangerous than others of the same ilk is that he is a very ignorant man - even ignorant, as the two examples quoted show, of the most basic facts of our recent history.

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