I am perturbed to see that I'm almost extinct. According to The Times, the name Richard - seven little letters that ooze power, wisdom and charm - is being bestowed on fewer and fewer mewling infants. When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte, 4,600 British babes a year were named Richard. I can't help feeling that there was some connection. Even in the 1950s, when my parents apparently plucked Richard from thin air (it featured nowhere in their family trees), it was regularly the third or fourth most popular name in the country.

Today? Dick is all but dead. Fewer than 600 babes a year are now given this inestimable start in life. It's a scandal. Where is David Miliband to tell us what Labour is going to do about it?

The strange thing is that I can't work out why. True, history has thrown up a fair number of overbearing Richards. Even if Richard III was the victim of character assassination by that Tudor propagandist Shakespeare (himself a lowly Willie, of course, and therefore obviously harbouring a psychological grudge against clever Dicks), we Richard-apologists still have to account for the likes of Wagner, Nixon, Dawkins and Branson. I wouldn't be overjoyed to be seated next to of any of them in the great pantheon of Richards in the sky.

But they are vastly outnumbered by the Richards who have been intelligent, creative, witty and a credit to their mums and dads. Think of Attenborough, Benaud, Burbage, Wakeman, Burton, Rodgers, Whittington, and the greatest of us all - the Lionheart.

I accept that our shared diminutive is, well, unhelpful. As a schoolboy I had a Latin master who never failed to greet my arrival in his classroom with a weird, high-pitched cry of “Aha, I've spotted Dick!” Like most “humorous” teachers in those days, he probably imagined that he was Spike Milligan. (Spike! Now that's a distinctive name...)

But it's pointless to search for rational explanations as to why names rise and fall in public esteem. There are too many mystifying oddities. Just consider the history of Jason. After Hollywood bestowed that name on the irritating little serial-murdering creep in the film Friday the 13th, parents understandably shied away from introducing a little Jason into their own families. But the mystery is why the name was so popular before that. After all, the original Jason - a bloodthirsty Greek marauder who left a trail of severed limbs and abused women across the Aegean - was hardly any different from the Friday the 13th one.

At least it's clear why the once pleasingly melodious name of Adolf fell out of fashion after the Second World War. But it's not at all obvious why Winston did as well. So did several other iconic names on the Allied side, such as Dwight and Vera. Like Egbert and Matilda, their time had passed.

The interesting question is whether our names shape our characters. Would my life have been different if I'd been named Nigel? Does a Richard by any other name smell as sweet? Or do we subconsciously “live up” (or down) to the labels implanted at birth? Even more intriguingly, how much do our names betray our social origins, and how much of a handicap can that be? Is it significant that there isn't a single boy at Eton named Dwayne?

Marshall McLuhan had no doubts. In his view, the debate about what defines personality shouldn't just be “nature or nurture?” but take account of nomenclature as well. “The name of a man,” he wrote in his 1964 classic, Understanding Media, “is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”

But that's not absolutely true. You can hide the full measure of your name's humiliating daftness behind initials, as Wystan Hugh Auden and Pelham Grenville Wodehouse found it prudent to do. Or, following the old adage that “a self-made man needs a self-made name”, you can change it altogether. John Wayne clearly felt that the name foisted on him by his obviously sadistic parents (it was Marion) might not suit the macho persona he projected in westerns. Similarly, those dancing dames, Ninette de Valois and Margot Fonteyn, were surely correct in calculating that they wouldn't twirl to the top of the snooty ballet world if they didn't dump their real names (Edris Stannus and Peggy Hookham respectively) for cooked-up monikers that exuded Gallic chic.

You can subtly alter your name to suit your own aspirations rather than your parents'. Obvious case: Anthony is a stuffy lawyer's name; Tony is a slick politician's. Less obvious case? We named our second son Edmund, thinking grandly that we might unilaterally revive the name of one of England's greatest martyr-kings. Alas, after having Edmund inscribed on his birth certificate, he's been Ed ever since. And because he's Ed, I'm convinced, he has become a hulking basketball player. Had we stuck to our principles and addressed him as Edmund throughout his formative years he would probably now be studying Ancient Greek scrolls in the Bodleian.

Unconvinced? Think of all the Kates you know, and imagine calling them Kathy instead. Impossible, isn't it? When a toddling Katharine demands to be called Kate, she's as good as snarling: “Don't mess with me, world!”

If people choose to rename themselves, that's their business. What I find more sinister are organisations that suddenly announce flashy new names. It usually means that they have perpetrated an embarrassing cock-up, and literally want to hide their faces. Remember when the leaky old Windscale nuclear plant was suddenly renamed Sellafield in an attempt to reassure us that there would be no more radioactive discharges? Or when the ailing Post Office spent more than a million quid giving itself the ludicrous pseudo-Latin moniker of Consignia - only to be ridiculed into a humiliating retreat? It's astonishing how often businesses fall into the trap of thinking that simply calling themselves something different will miraculously dissipate their woes. Last year British industry spent £100million on renamings - and that doesn't include the cost of signage and letterheads.

But the fetish for renaming pervades every walk of life and every country. Whole cities are sometimes renamed - often (as with St Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad/St Petersburg) in a doomed attempt to exorcise bad memories of previous regimes. Let's not fall into the trap of thinking that such Orwellian nonsenses “couldn't happen here”. Just recall how your local sink-comprehensive has been glossed into an “academy” with a fancy new name that exudes an entirely imaginary aura of achievement. Or how, for political reasons, the Royal Ulster Constabulary has been forced to impose the bland title Police Service of Northern Ireland on itself.

If I were to rename myself in similar fashion, I'd pay homage to a personal hero. But Johann Sebastian Morrison? Mahatma Morrison? Pelé Morrison? Can't quite imagine that in a byline. Looks as if it's my lonely but proud destiny to be the Last of the Richards.

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