Say what you will about Theresa May, she loves a ban. I imagine the home secretary starts each day with an incantation of the Banaholics Anonymous prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the 330,000 immigrants I can’t stop, the courage to ban the rappers I can, and the wisdom to pretend the public don’t know the difference.”

And so to a mixed scoreline for May. On the one hand, figures released on Thursday show net immigration running at a record high. On the other, the home secretary has banned 24-year-old rapper Tyler, the Creator from entering the country for his use of homophobic slurs in albums released some years ago. Swings and roundabouts, innit.

Anyway, the latter tale came to light after Tyler – a frequent visitor to and performer in the UK over the past few years – suddenly cancelled planned appearances. The rapper’s manager, a Christian Clancy, subsequently offered a lengthy explanation on his blog, asserting that Tyler has been banned from the UK by “the secretary of state for the home department of the United Kingdom”. According to Clancy, “highlights from the letter include that his work ‘encourages violence and intolerance of homosexuality’ and ‘fosters hatred with views that seek to provoke others to terrorist acts’”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Our main line of defence … Theresa May. Photograph: Joe Giddens

Possibly feeling under pressure to explain why they’ve spent even 30 seconds of departmental time on this, the home office has now released a statement. “Coming to the UK is a privilege,” this reads, “and we expect those who come here to respect our shared values. The Home Secretary has the power to exclude an individual if she considers that his or her presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good or if their exclusion is justified on public policy grounds.” Well, quite. You shall know a country by its worthy foes, and Great Britain’s is … hang on, let me get my reading glasses on as I’ve already forgotten the chap’s name … Ah, yes. A Mr Tyler, the Creator. I don’t want any smartarses pointing out that even the George W Bush administration let Axis of Evil Allstar Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into the US to give a speech at Columbia University in 2007. May is here to show you that lyrics have borders. Just like ideas in the internet age.

For his part, Tyler’s manager appears to acknowledge that his artist used to be a hideous little toerag (I paraphrase slightly), but argues that apart from being an issue of free speech, the ban fails to take into account that these are historical lyrics, and that Tyler can be demonstrated to have grown up, and should not be punished for things he said when he was 18.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Even the US let this guy in … former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Photograph: Reuters

Well. If there isn’t a home office department that measures artistic and moral growth, there certainly ought to be. Having said that – and reading between the lines of Clancy’s blog – it seems the home secretary’s office got bizarrely bogged down in the detail of how Tyler constructs his tracks. What else to make of the manager’s claim that “the letter acknowledged he was writing from an alter ego perspective”? Did it? Lost in Showbiz is now picturing some mandarin blowing the dust off the departmental Discman and frowning his way through 2011’s Sandwitches and wondering whether this is that “unreliable narrator” thing they dimly remember from A-level English. Maybe it’s one for the minister. “Secretary of state, I wonder if you might give me your views on the stanza I have highlighted. There is some dispute on the authorial voice: is he literally saying he would do this to the babymama – there’s a glossary of terms at the back of the bundle, by the way – or is this a sort of angry pose as social commentary…?” It all sounds like the worst episode of Yes Minister ever.

Anyway, Clancy the manager also says that Tyler has been excluded from the UK for “somewhere between three and five years”, at which point it is presumably hoped he will be either working sensibly in accounts for a mid-size Wisconsin plastics firm, or a middle-eastern dictator or something.

All that is left is for Clancy to wonder: “Is race a conscious or subconscious factor at all?” Couldn’t tell you. Nationality and rank definitely are, however. I’m not sure if the home office website yet has a dedicated Homophobia Hacks section, but I can tell you it really helps with this stuff if you’re a Saudi king. In that instance, of course, your homophobia is not of the same order as Tyler’s – he previously used the word “gay” disparagingly on a record, whereas you merely stage frequent executions of gays. But for the purposes of getting your moral bearings, you’ll get a state visit, and he won’t be allowed to underwhelm on the no-mark stage at the Reading festival.

As for May, at the launch of the Tory manifesto for the recent general election, her biggest boast was a thundered: “I have excluded from Britain MORE HATE PREACHERS than Any. Other. Home. Secretary.” Let’s just be psyched for her that this line now comes with added rappers. Maybe when May takes the stage at next month’s Conservative party conference, she should read excerpts of Tyler’s grossest lyrics to show the party the threat she saved us all from. In fact, I hope she goes the whole hog and riffs on the Jack Nicholson speech from A Few Good Men. “Conference, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded. Who’s going to do it? George? BORIS?! Deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall …”