That’s the thing with indignation. It feels so good at the time. But then you look back and feel horribly embarrassed. What did I do that for? Why did I chop up my Nectar card in a fit of anti-capitalist pique at the Camden Roundhouse? Why did I get so upset about American gun laws when I live in Chipping Norton? Why did I and every other middle-class guilt-ridden schmuck in that auditorium nod my head in unison when the man in front of us said passengers on the September 11 aircraft were too wimpish to resist because they were white? I did it because Michael Moore told me to. And I’ll never be able to forgive him for it.

Moore, an angry Man of the People from Michigan, became notorious in his home town of Flint when, as the youngest person ever elected to his local school board, he’d forced the principal and his deputy to resign. In the 1980s he worked on a radical magazine, Mother Jones, where he alienated colleagues, was sacked, then sued it for unfair dismissal. He received only a fraction of the $2 million that he’d hoped for, but ploughed the money into his first documentary Roger and Me, a diatribe against the American car industry.

Next came Bowling for Columbine, about gun-related violence in the United States, which won the 2003 Oscar for Best Documentary. Mainly ecstatic reviewers chose to ignore an uncomfortable scene in which Moore seems to bully a visibly frail Charlton Heston. Meanwhile, his book Stupid White Men was selling out and had spawned a ranting left-wing canon. Moore toured the world a hero but went too far at his Oscar acceptance tirade, in which he called George W. Bush a “fictitious president”.

Suddenly Moore was No 3 on the New York press’s list of the 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers: he never came up with solutions; he steamrollered hecklers. He was illogical and bent the truth. Somebody set up moorewatch.com to expose his “deceptions and half-truths”. In 2004, Moore’s Bush-bashing documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 was released and Christopher Hitchens wrote an essay called The Lies of Michael Moore. It became fashionable to hate him.

BACKGROUND

• Sicko review

• Weinstein braces for backlash

• Moore is wrong about the NHS

• Ministering to the Sicko

BACKGROUND

• Moore in hot water for Cuba trip

• Citizen Moore

• Moore's ill wind blows over political agenda

• Review: America: Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore

• Tables turned on Fahrenheit 9/11’s maker

Just how good is Mr Good Guy?

Michael Moore is misleading, vain, irritating, greedy, hypocritical, pointless and ineffective. Or is he?

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Moore’s Sicko, a look at America’s crumbling health service, is released this week. And this time the public is prepared. In their determination not to be blinded by their own sentimentality again, reviewers have concentrated on detailed analysis of the film’s inaccuracies. In Britain, Moore’s rose-tinted view of the NHS particularly jars. Moore is misleading, vain, irritating, greedy, hypocritical, pointless and ineffective is the fashionable line. All this may be true. But Sicko’s tag line reads: “For many Americans, laughter isn’t the best medicine — it’s the only medicine.” This may also be true. But where is the scrupulous, modest, non-irritating, ascetic, sincere, effective Moore-substitute to say so?

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