The 54-year-old stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard came to Cambridge as part of his Stand Up For Europe campaign, which sees him travelling to 31 cities in 31 days, attempting to encourage young people to vote to remain in the European Union. The media attention his visit attracts is notable. Three hours before his talk in the main chamber begins, the Cambridge Union’s library is more crammed with journalists than I’ve ever seen it, with presenters and their film crews speaking in different languages as they perform sound and screen tests in advance of a coveted interview slot.

After being introduced as a journalist from Varsity, Izzard asks me, “What does Varsity actually mean?” Before I can think about a response, he answers himself: “Nobody knows.” I make a feeble attempt to link Varsity to the last three syllables of ‘university’, after which he says triumphantly: “That would be my first question to Varsity. What do you actually mean?” Right. An unexpected start.

Dressed in a campaign t-shirt, wearing a Stand Up For Europe badge and with nail-varnish bearing the EU and UK flag designs, there could be no doubt as to the message Izzard is trying to get across.

“It’s so important [students] vote on 23rd June,” he says earnestly. He speaks quickly, and it is clear that this is something he has said many times before.

“They should be empowered; this one will affect them not like a general election. A general election is about mortgages and families and they think, ‘What’s it got to do to me?’ [whereas] I think this one can really affect students.”

I ask him why he has become so interested and involved in the referendum debate: “I am not sure exactly why it is that from a very early age I was interested. I was born in Yemen, I was born to British parents, I’ve lived in Northern Ireland, South Wales and the South of England. I’ve always liked people, I find people interesting, I think I could talk to 95 per cent of the world and sit down and have a chat.”

He cites a number of valid arguments in favour of the EU from a student’s perspective: money coming into UK universities, the Erasmus scheme, low-cost flights to Europe in the summer, low roaming charges and free health care. He declares: “You never hear about them because they’re good news and no one puts good news out. So I’m telling everyone, they’re out there, fight for them.”

Izzard has a humanitarian attitude towards world politics, and his idealism is clear as he transitions, perhaps unintentionally, from describing the real benefits of EU membership to his ideal vision of a connected world: “[…] fantastic things, and just a positive outlook and open-handed politics where you reach and you say, ‘Hi, who are you? You’re French, you’re German, you’re Italian, and what do you do? Can I learn from you? Can you learn from us? Now let’s talk to each other’; let’s do that rather than this, poll-backed nationalistic thing where people are pulling up walls and separating it out.”

In both his interview and speech, Izzard’s rhetoric is impressive and impassioned. He discusses the origins of the EU: “From Alexander the Great to World War Two, two and a half thousand years of murder and then we stopped, and we said, ‘Let’s make peace work’, and that’s what we’re built on.’’

Yet one gets a sense that he falls back on indisputable, crowd-pleasing one-liners such as “think of humanity” and sweeping statements about the history of the human race, at times when discussion of the specifics of the politics and economics involved in the referendum would have been welcome. He dabbles in analogy to little effect, suggesting that civilisation, as distinct from terrorism, is “like crops: you have to plant it and feed it and let it grow.”

For example, at one point he tells me, “If you look at the history of humanity, walls are put up when you’re going backward, hands are reached out when you’re going forwards, it’s building bridges and open windows and trying to get better” – a statement perhaps true and reasonable, but it is no great stretch to say it is of more relevance to human behaviour and morality in general than to the specific issues at the crux of the referendum debate.

At times, Izzard advocates becoming informed, for example, by reading the news. Yet he also says, “If you’re getting confused by the numbers, think of humanity.”

He is keen to clarify to me that he is not advocating casting a vote based on emotional judgements but rather that, with people too busy or uninterested to inform themselves, it is inevitable that many will “do it on a completely gut and emotional level”.

Izzard’s involvement in the referendum campaign has attracted its fair share of criticism in the media. His recent appearance on BBC’s Question Time resulted in a pantomime-like exchange of repeated ‘Yes it is’, ‘No it isn’t’, with a member of the audience who suggested that the country’s economy was safer outsider the EU. In the Q&A session at the Union, despite his evident sincerity, it was difficult to ignore the audible sniggers when, for example, asked about why members of the Commonwealth with no economic interest in Britain should vote to remain, he replied, “for humanity, above all”.

This is not to say that these were necessarily laughs of derision, and certainly not of disagreement with his argument, but rather, I suspect, the natural response to a comedian giving such a simple and straightforward response to an issue that is proving to be anything but.

He constantly links his political ideology with his own achievements, reminding us with a somewhat unnecessary frequency of his ability to perform in multiple languages and that he toured Europe to do so: “I don’t think anyone’s ever done that before.”

It is worth mentioning, at this point, as he did partway through his speech, that Izzard intends to become an MP in 2020. This sheds light on his constant linking of running 27 marathons in 27 days and visiting 31 universities in 31 days.

He claims both as justifications or explanations of his argument about the Remain campaign, yet, to me, this link is tenuous in comparison with the other obvious similarity: that both are attracting an enormous amount of good publicity. In one comment, he sounds almost Boris Johnson-esque as he says: “I do like history. Churchill liked history.” At another point, he remarks: “I don’t believe in God, but I believe in us. I think we’re pretty good. You know, I’ve done some marathons […]”

However, perhaps part of Izzard’s charm and appeal is that he is not a fully-trained, smooth-talking politician, with a supply of facts and statistics at his fingers. While criticism that he lapses into platitudes and sweeping statements about human morality are certainly true, what’s to say that such rhetoric isn’t helpful to the debate? In his own words, he’s “just trying to put forward sensible, passionate things” and – in a debate about whether to unite with or separate ourselves from a continent – perhaps we shouldn’t shy away from making moral judgements, based on gut instinct and our own sense of the term ‘humanity’.

When he tells us, for perhaps the third or fourth time, that “despair is the fuel of terrorism; hope is the fuel of civilisation”, the worst Eddie Izzard could be accused of is preaching to the converted.