There's always room for one more on the Ship of Fools, and Tom McCarthy has just booked his passage. The English novelist (no, I'd never heard of him, either) has written a column of such fifth-form puerility in the Guardian that it marks him down as a dunce of exceptional plumage. Make way, Hadley Freeman. Step aside, Zoe Williams. There's a chap out there who can give you five yards and still beat you to the tape.
McCarthy, of Dulwich College and Oxford (just right for the Guardian), is in a frightful bate because he has been invited to a bash at the Royal Academy to celebrate British art and feels insulted: 'Like all English-language writers, I'm thoroughly European'. To prove it he refers to Shakespeare and Joyce, who, like him, would have voted to remain part of the European Union.
There are the usual clichés one expects from a man who read Derrida and Barthes when he was in short pants, and never got over it: cross-pollination, intersections, culture - shaping innovators. All of which brings to mind Tom Stoppard's wonderful speech in The Real Thing about 'every stale revelation of the newly enlightened '.
Stoppard, who was born in the old Czechoslovakia and became the most English of dramatists, could tell the likes of McCarthy quite a lot about writing and identity. But such people are more comfortable when they are doing the talking. Opting to visit a festival in Hackney instead of going to the RA, our batey pal says everybody had fun 'celebrating internationalism and renouncing tribalism bigotry'. Cor! Can we all join in?
He's every inch the artist, is McCarthy. And one thing artists must never do, he says with the zeal of a prophet, 'is be politically neutral'. Particularly in 'a country where people are being killed in the street for not sounding or looking 'British' enough'. Or indeed not Islamic enough. The murders of Muslims in Glasgow and Rochdale were committed by co-religionists. As for the many acts of murder and violence in recent months in mainland Europe, he offers not a word. Maybe it has all passed him by, this proud European.
Not all artists are political. Matisse lived through two world wars, and there is no sign of upheaval in his paintings. In the early months of the second world war Vaughan Williams composed his fifth, and greatest, symphony. Although London was under siege, his symphony was a work of radiance. Are the novels of Hardy and Lawrence political? Or Joyce, for that matter? Not in the way this clown means. Stoppard again: 'We should have the courage to lack convictions'.
Or, to borrow from a truly European figure, Karl Kraus of Vienna, McCarthy has nothing to say, and is determined to say it.