Michelle mania: Why London is so hotly anticipating an audience with the other Obama

At 10am last Thursday, the Southbank Centre experienced a transatlantic blast of the “Michelle Effect”.

Tickets to Michelle Obama’s book tour talk sold out in minutes, as more than 60,000 people clamoured for just over 2,700 seats at the event at Royal Festival Hall on 3 December (minutes later, some appeared for as much as £72,000 on the Viagogo site). 300 tickets are being given away for free to schoolchildren.

Her memoir, Becoming, is released tomorrow. A “Love Letters to Michelle Obama” event at Waterstones in Gower Street to celebrate it has completely sold out, too. She’s here for a whirlwind three-day tour, taking in a VIP power couples dinner with George and Amal Clooney, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Anticipation has been drummed up by a viral marketing campaign, including a 30-foot mural of her in Brixton and pop-up bookshop in Bloomsbury.

“I just want to breathe the same air as her,” explains Nichole Edmund, a south London secondary school teacher, and 33,809th in Thursday’s line to see Obama, 54, in conversation with the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

“It’s not just Michelle, it’s Chimamanda — they’re heavyweights. While I was in the queue I slid into her DMs on Instagram and said, ‘Hey, big Miche, you’re going to need a bigger venue’.”

Apologies to Spice Girls and Harry Potter fans, who have other big releases to enjoy — but it’s a lawyer from the south side of Chicago who is currently the hottest ticket in town.

London is calling, again

The former FLOTUS has friends here. After her Southbank talk, she’ll reportedly be whisked off to a dinner hosted by George and Amal Clooney at their £10 million home on an island in Berkshire, on the Thames, which the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are set to attend (the Obamas are friends with the British Royal Family).

Her visit is set to leave a lasting mark on the city — in Brixton, artist Neequaye Dreph Dsane (known as Dreph), has been putting the final touches to a 30-foot mural of Michelle Obama in Brixton, commissioned by Becoming’s publisher Penguin Random House.

“Michelle Obama is the ultimate embodiment of ‘You Are Enough’,” says Dreph. “Regardless of where it comes from, young people need someone visible, progressive, and relatable.”

Class(room) Act

During Barack Obama’s two White House terms, aides spoke wonderingly of the “Michelle Effect”. The New York Times noted J Crew enjoyed sales spikes every time the First Lady wore the brand; politicos observed that Fox, CNN and MSNBC news anchors all adopted FLOTUS’s signature sleeveless look.

There were scientific papers published on the “effect”; in New Haven, a behavioural economics professor found that on Halloween, children who were randomly assigned to the side of his porch with a photo of Michelle Obama were 19 per cent more likely to choose fruit over sweets when trick-or-treating.

London has also embraced the “effect”, and been embraced. In 2009, Michelle Obama visited the pupils of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School while in London with her husband for a G20 summit, then asked students to meet her in Oxford two years later. She finally invited a dozen pupils to visit her in the White House in 2012. Simon Burgess, a professor of economics at the University of Bristol, noted GCSE grades at the all-girls inner-city school improved comparatively by an average of two grade points per student.

“We had a bounce, too ... I think all the girls’ grades improved,” says Nusrath Hassan, 21, a law student at SOAS University, who was 17 when she escorted the former First Lady during a visit to her schoolyard at Mulberry School for Girls in Tower Hamlets, back in 2015. “She hugged me so close, and that made me feel like I could do anything. I still watch YouTube videos of the speech she gave to us before I go into exams.”

Special relationships

Although Donald and Melania Trump’s recent visit to the UK largely skipped the capital, Michelle Obama will be on familiar territory during her trip next month. Michelle showed her daughters the city in 2009. She, Malia and Sasha took in Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey, then stopped in at The Audley, a pub in Mayfair, which boasted the “best fish and chips in W1”.

They also dropped in at The Lion King at the Lyceum Theatre, and visited Pinewood Studios to meet the stars of Harry Potter and author J.K. Rowling. A birthday party for Sasha Obama was held on the Hogwarts Great Hall set. Indeed, she has a large book of London contacts. Marcus Samuelsson, the Harlem chef who has cooked with Michelle on the White House lawn, has his Red Rooster restaurant in Shoreditch, too.

She’s also remained good friends with Sarah Brown, the campaigner for women and children’s health and wife of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, taking tea with her in London after the pair first met at the White House in 2009. (“At last, a normal-sized person,” were her first words to Sarah).

“Michelle is of a mind with me about keeping our children’s lives as ordinary as possible, while letting them share in the special moments,” Brown wrote in her book, Behind the Black Door. “When I leave, I get the big Michelle hug before I jump back in the car.”

And Obama stays in touch. “My phone started blowing up just a few months after I met her,” says Hassan. The student won the “Young Star” award at 2016’s Women of the Future Awards for her work on the Let Girls Learn campaign, founded by Michelle. “She’d tweeted to say congratulations, and it basically shut my whole phone down.”

The people’s FLOTUS

“She means so much to so many of us — especially to young black women who live in the UK,” says Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, 25, deputy editor of the magazine gal-dem, which is collaborating with Becoming publisher Penguin Random House and Waterstones on a pop-up Bloomsbury bookshop from 23 November. It will champion authors of colour. “Growing up, she’s one of the first public figures we saw in an authority position who was actually doing good things with that authority, constantly talking about issues that resonated with us, such as supporting girls and education.”

“I’ve only had two people say anything negative — anything at all — in the four days we’ve been painting here,” says the Brixton mural creator Dreph.

“That’s unusual for something like this. One old lady thought we were defacing the wall, but gave us £10 to buy ourselves coffees when I told her what we were doing. Another didn’t like Mrs Obama’s husband’s politics. I said, what’s her husband got to do with who she is?”

Certainly, Michelle Obama is an independent phenomenon; a mother superior figure in Converse trainers, and a true north on a moral compass spinning ever more wildly in 2018.

She still generates headlines, for good reasons. Last week she spoke of feeling “lost and alone” after suffering a miscarriage, and told of undergoing IVF to conceive daughters Malia, now 20, and Sasha, 17. She said: “I felt like I failed as I didn’t know how common miscarriages were, as we don’t talk about them.”

In the era of the shock jockey, Michelle’s re-emergence is closer to an equestrian showjumper. Michelle and Barack have signed a deal with Netflix to produce films and documentaries for the streaming giant. Although she’s ruled out running for the White House, Barack’s own Presidential run followed a memoir, Dreams From My Father, published in 1995.

Edmund adds: “People talk about role models like Beyoncé and Cardi B, but I can’t rap, dance and sing like they can. But Michelle — I can be her, I can identify with her.

“She grew up in a rough area, went to university, and became a lawyer, and also just happened to marry a guy who became President. She’s got black girl magic. But she’s achievable.”