A mysterious and extravagantly coutured figure boarded the Sheffield-bound East Midlands Trains service at St Pancras station on Wednesday morning. Wearing a Victorian-style cape over a lavender satin minidress with a pleated collar, the visual artist Grayson Perry was leaving the capital to meet some more of his increasingly enthusiastic public audience.

Around him in the carriage were a mix of travellers from a handful of British social tribes that Perry so ably identifies, both in his art and in his television documentaries. The only thing they appeared to have in common was that they were not looking at him. It seems the pantomime eye makeup and the outlandish garb can serve as a protective forcefield. Although Perry’s dressing-up habit might seem attention-seeking, it also effectively fends off the duller outside world without any hint of aggression. (Typically, Perry was quick to joke about his incongruous appearance for the journey up north, tweeting his 100,000 followers a selfie of his “grande dame” get-up underneath the words: “Wearing this outfit boarding the train to Sheffield I can kid myself it’s the Orient Express.”)

Perry, 57, was heading for Sheffield University, where he was to give the first annual Orwell Lecture in the North that evening on the subject of social empathy. He would be facing a crowd of almost a thousand, carefully targeted from around the city, as well as from the university. Tickets had sold quickly. Perry is a reliable entertainer, and that is not something you can say about many artists. Or many lecturers for that matter.

The city was a good choice, post-Brexit. The split of the vote between Leave and Remain in Sheffield mirrored the national result. While financial hardship may explain much of the discontent behind the feelings of the anti-European contingent, many others have been left reeling by the prospect of losing the regular influx of enthusiastic foreign students.

So the pressure was on Perry the potter to offer some kind of national panacea. Since the success of his 2013 BBC Reith lectures, the country increasingly looks to him not just to analyse its mindset amusingly, but to offer a way forward.

The book version of his Reith lectures, Playing to the Gallery, set out Perry’s culture credo more clearly than the talks had themselves. It is, according to the Observer’s review, a new kind of artistic manifesto. Instead of offering guidelines for improved taste, it is rather “a polemic for inclusivity”.

Perry’s has been a remarkable rise from the murky lowland habitat of a marginal artist to the rarified atmosphere enjoyed by those few national personalities who are licensed to explain the world to the rest of us on television. Born in Essex, he suffered a miserable childhood in Chelmsford. (He says that when he and his siblings meet up they still refer to each other as “shrapnel”). That evening, on stage in Sheffield, he was to shake up younger members of his audience by revealing that there is only one existing photograph of his teenage self and that it was taken by a neighbour. “Dysfunctional families don’t really want to advertise,” he explained poignantly.

After graduating in fine art from Portsmouth Polytechnic, Perry worked away in the niche avant-garde pottery scene, but came to wider notice when he won the Turner prize in 2003. After that his flamboyant feminine alter ego, Claire, ensured he was regularly pictured in magazines and newspapers, often attending a swish party or a gala opening. As the artist is fond of noting: “I am part of the establishment now.”

His recent clever tapestries chart our national mores, but also touch with precision on the human emotional landscape and have garnered considerable praise. One of them, the eight-metre wide Comfort Blanket, now graces the Graves gallery in Sheffield. But even people who don’t like his art do now tend to admit he is a gifted communicator. His 2012 television series on taste for Channel 4 was followed by further acclaimed programmes on identity and on masculinity and were seen as landmark viewing in our changing times. The political divisions surrounding the Brexit vote were handled for Channel 4 in May in Divided Britain, a show widely hailed as a triumph. “By the end Perry … had defined the new divides in British society more succinctly and graphically than anything I’ve seen or read from any sociologist, economist, political scientist or, indeed, journalist. As a contribution to understanding what on earth is going on in Britain these days, it’s not been bettered,” wrote Sean O’Grady in the Independent.

Grayson Perry tests out his bike Patience in his studio in East Sussex. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

For Wednesday evening Perry had picked out the ironic title “I’ve read all the academic texts on empathy” to point up his academic insecurities. “I have read the spines of many books,” he quipped later. Yet his lecture swooped usefully on nuggets from the work of the controversial psychiatrist RD Laing and the social anthropologist Kate Fox, as well as from the long history of visual art. He also used a popular term culled from the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci to account for his place on the lecturer’s platform. “I am an organic intellectual,” he said, wryly looking out at a hall containing more than its fair share of conventional professors.

The thrust of Perry’s message was this: people don’t like being told what to think, so if you want to influence them, you should talk to them as equals. He began provocatively by flashing a huge “trigger warning” sign. “You like trigger warnings now at universities, don’t you?” he said. There would be, he added, content that might offend someone. As his long legs gleamed above his huge, stacked heels, he pointed out: “You can’t ‘no platform’ me.”

The artist’s target, if there is one in such a benevolent world view, is the growing tendency for opinions to be entrenched in identity politics: those people who start to speak by defining their own minority perspective, or victim status, are not helping, he believes.

The argument, with Perry, is always laid out like a jigsaw, sometimes visually. And it is often all the more persuasive for it. The second and third rows of the lecture hall were taken by 40 sixth-form students from local schools who had been attending an Orwell youth prize workshop for young writers that day. Instructed by Michael Callanan and Marina Lewycka, the Orange prizewinning author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, they had already been told that getting a point over to your reader is a question of first getting them to engage – perhaps by surprising them with an unusual viewpoint, rather than by directly stating your opinions. They could not have watched a better example of that special skill.

Student Esme Kenny, 16, who goes to nearby Tapton School, was impressed. “It was really interesting. I was always wondering what was going to happen next and he covered a lot,” she said.

The body of Perry’s plan for recovery from the social shock of the Brexit vote is to tackle the rampant “diaphobia” he has detected. This is a technical term he purloined from Laing via his psychotherapist wife, Phillipa, and it describes the problematic fear of being changed by other people. It builds divisions quickly, he argued.

Our complex individual identities are only relevant, he suggests, in as far as they can be shared. In a moving moment of the lecture Perry discussed the pain of separation whenever a close bond between a couple is broken by death or illness. His own large woodcut, Reclining Artist, seems to express this fear of separation. The facial features and the nude bodies of Perry and his wife are shown merging together.

Perry’s parting shot was a return to home territory. As the new chancellor of the University of the Arts London, he was honour-bound to point out that culture, in both its broadest and its most particular sense, can bind us and aid empathy.

For one woman in the audience, Abigail Scott Paul, of the social thinktank the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Perry’s thoughts about the way arguments should be communicated were crucial. “We’ve realised at the foundation that facts and evidence about poverty, ‘statistical truth’ as Grayson described it, is not enough to shift public attitudes or to get the policy change we need to see,” she said. “With poverty levels staying pretty much the same for the past 25 years, that strategy has not worked. Just telling people ‘you’re wrong – here’s the evidence’ turns people off and doesn’t change minds.”

This weekend Perry is back to being a contemporary artist, with a show opening at Colchester’s First Site gallery. But it is clear it will not be long before this forthright transvestite ceramicist from Chelmsford is called upon once again to set us all straight.

PERRY’S CV

Born March 1960 in Chelmsford, Essex.

Childhood Marred by his mother’s affair with a milkman when he was five. His engineer father moved out and the milkman, an amateur wrestler, moved in.

Education King Edward VI school Chelmsford, Braintree College of Further Education, then Portsmouth Polytechnic, where he studied fine art.

Awards Picked up the 2003 Turner prize dressed as his then childlike female alter ego, Claire.

Family Married to psychotherapist Philippa Perry. One daughter, Florence.

Achievements 2013 BBC Reith Lectures, chancellor of UAL.

On art “Anything can be art, but there is very little good art.”