When most authors do a "reading" they get a few dozen devotees in a chilly book shop. Michael Moore, film-maker turned best-selling polemicist, is now so huge that when he promotes a book, even the biggest Waterstone«s is not big enough. He needs consecutive sittings at the London Palladium, and even they don«t leave a spare seat in the house.
He does very little performance: just him, a shlubby guy in baseball hat and ill-fitting jeans standing by the microphone. He riffs on a few themes, reads a chapter of his book and then takes a lot of questions.
In amongst which he packs a few great lines. He urges Britons to be brave enough to sack Blair; the left have nothing to fear from the Tories who are deader than dinosaurs.
"Come on, buck up here. You used to be brave and bold and send Australians into battle!"
He hits all the buttons his audience want pressed: Blair must go, Bush is evil, Murdoch should be struck down by a thunderbolt. But the evening leaves a couple of reasons for a progressive not to feel so cheerful.
First, it may come naturally to the right wing to have guru figures like Rush Limbaugh, with his outsized ego and legions of "dittohead" followers. But the bow-down homage to Moore that precedes each audience question, coupled with his own bragging about his phenomenal book sales and website traffic, feels incongruous for a gathering of the left.
Second, what Moore serves up is political comfort food: simple and reassuring. There«s no shame in that: he«s trying, successfully it seems, to reach a mass audience turned off by politics.
But the audience, lapping up a black-and-white view of the world in which lefties like them are goodies and everyone else (especially Americans) is stupid, cannot let themselves off so easily. They ought to do better than this.
· Michael Moore is on book tour throughout Britain until the end of the week.
