Me and you and a boy named Bea

I imagine that most of you were as moved as I was last week by the marvellous news that Sir Paul and Lady McCartney had had a baby boy. Twenty years from now, I imagined, little Joseph would be the spitting image of his father, whose baby-faced good looks and "Beatle" haircut made such an impression on every schoolgirl of my generation. Scarcely had this nostalgic image begun to form in my brain, however, when I learned that the happy couple had selected the names "Beatrice Milly" for their infant. I mean, I am all for challenging gender stereotypes, and I know there is a tradition in the pop world of giving children names like "Zoot Moonrocket". But I couldn't help wondering whether the McCartneys had really considered the implications of turning their first child together into a boy named Bea.

Enter Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror, who popped up on Radio 4 to insist that his paper's exclusive report of the McCartney birth was at least half right: the couple had had a baby on Tuesday, but it was a girl. As well as getting the infant's sex wrong, Morgan also had to confess that the story was not a scoop in the sense that the word is normally used, unless we now live in a world of such impoverished standards that lifting a story from the Mirror's sister paper in Scotland, the Daily Record, qualifies as investigative journalism. But by the time the proud parents put the record straight, the Mirror's error had been picked up and repeated by the BBC, the Press Association, Reuters, Associated Press and on the front page of the London Evening Standard.

Outside the Royal Family, births used to be private events, which people paid to announce to their family and friends in the back pages of newspapers. Now they are front-page news and the competition is so intense that, in this instance, accuracy was sacrificed to an urge to see off the competition. I have no idea whether the Mirror was deliberately misled about the sex of the McCartney sprog - I have observed before that the urge to lie to tabloid hacks must on occasion be irresistible - but without co-operation from the family or hospital staff the problem of verification is all but insuperable. "The trouble with babies is they can all look very similar", Morgan confessed, and I was relieved to hear that his paper's source had had only an "above-waist" glimpse of little Beatrice, instead of rooting about in her nappy. Perhaps tabloid hacks will in future be instructed to inspect infant genitalia, in which case their editors would be wise to provide a covering letter to avert the risk of their staff being arrested on suspicion of paedophilia.

Leaving schadenfreude aside for a moment - it's hard, but I am going to make a big effort - this absurd tale exposes the lunacies perpetrated by formerly respectable media organisations in their relentless pursuit of stories about celebrities. The Mirror claims rather grandly to be a paper of historical record, yet it rushed into print and was forced to mount a hasty and begrudging defence of its conduct. (What next? "Britain invades Iran". Oh, sorry, we meant to say Iraq. But we were three-quarters right.) Newspapers and broadcasters have become so obsessed with the kind of people who appear regularly in Hello! magazine that they have lost all sense of proportion, even though it is hard to imagine that anyone would have cared if we had had to wait for the "official" announcement of the birth.

On the contrary, this desperate scramble to publish trivia about pop stars, models and footballers merely inflates their already over-weening sense of self-importance. McCartney has achieved nothing of substance since shortly after I left school and his pronouncements in recent years - from urging complete strangers to give up meat in memory of his first wife, Linda, to offering to take on al-Qa'ida single-handed after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 - reveal a breathtaking solipsism. In a sensible world, his marriage to a woman almost half his age would be regarded as vampiric, and the "news" that he has become a father again at the age of 61 would merit no more than a couple of paragraphs. Spectacular as it is, the cock-up about the baby's gender diverts attention from the fact that "Macca's wee cracker", as the Daily Record described it, is really a damp squib.