This is really awful. It made for a terrible article in the Guardian at the weekend (splashed on the front cover and then given a two and a half pages less the very large group photograph and a still from Atonement, both of which are vital, of course, when you're talking about books. What on earth are you supposed to say about the literary novel in a couple of thousand words? Better not to bother).

But it's really awful because - and this is horribly uncharitable, but so what: there is something incredibly important at stake here - the four judges have absolutely no intellectual authority whatsoever.

Alex Clark - critic and broadcaster. No, James Wood is a critic, Alex Clark is a book reviewer. Broadcaster - 1] we'll have to take your word for it; 2] so what?

Janet Lee - editor of The Culture Show. Um, so the editor of The Culture Show thought she would be the right person to contribute to, er, a Culture Show 'special'. What a wonderful coincidence that she should happen to edit the show and be one of the four people in the country best able to pronounce on debut novels. Even less attractive than nepotism (which at least is giving someone else a leg-up).

Helen Oyeyemi and Sam Leith - novelists. Yes, they are novelists; very, very minor novelists. If I can add up correctly, Oyeyemi is a 26-year-old novelist. Couldn't they have found someone younger? "Oh, what does how old she is matter?" It matters because the older you are, the more you are likely to have read; the more you have read, the more your opinion about writing counts. As for Sam Leith, he may be a novelist but this means only that he has written a novel, not that he has dedicated himself to the novel form. For if I'm not very much mistaken, he is also the author of Dead Pets: Stuff Them, Eat Them, Love Them. But fair enough, 'novelist' goes down much better at dinner parties than 'hack'.

These four aren't - are they? - fit to sharpen DJ Taylor's pencil (change his printer cartridge, whatever), and I'm not even sure that I think DJ Taylor is all that good. What a mockery. Can anyone who reads literary novels, who cares about them, be expected to take this seriously? Please, please don't let any publisher produce a sticker that says 'As featured on ...'. Please.