Oxford, Bethnal Green and the Guardian: surprising British backstory of senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed

In the tense final hours before his dramatic election as senator for Michigan in this week’s midterms, Abdul El-Sayed had a heated encounter with a British TV journalist that rapidly went viral.

As James Matthews, of Sky News, tried to ask him a question, El-Sayed bit back. “Why would I care to have a conversation with you?” he demanded of Matthews, placing both hands on the reporter’s shoulders in a gesture of emphasis.

“You know how many votes I want to get in the UK? Zero. I am never running for office in the UK. So I actually do not care what you think or the questions you ask.”

The clip has been viewed more than 13m times on X. But the pugnacious senator-elect has not always been so dismissive of British politics and voters. Guardian readers with longer memories may recall a young Rhodes scholar who in May 2010 wrote an article for this newspaper that declared – somewhat boldly for a future US senator – that “UK democracy has the upper hand on the US”.

El-Sayed’s heated encounter with James Matthews of Sky News has been vewed 13m times on social media. Photograph: Sky News/Twitter X

El-Sayed was then a 25-year-old doctoral student at Oxford University and had just attended a Labour party hustings in Bethnal Green and Bow, east London, to choose a parliamentary candidate. That meeting, he wrote, had persuaded him that the UK’s electoral system was, in some respects, superior to that of the US, leaving him “envious” of the British way of doing things.

“As an American, born, bred, and taught in school that American democracy was the greatest in the world, I was initially sceptical of this foreign brand,” he wrote. “But what I experienced that evening was a ceremony in communal self-determination that I have yet to see in any federal American electoral institution.”

El-Sayed’s election in Michigan was one of the standout headlines of Tuesday’s poll after facing a barrage of racism and Islamophobia during the campaign. Donald Trump mocked his name, called him a “jihadist lunatic” and said the Senate would have to “get a special metal detector for Abdul” if he were elected. He was also denounced at the last minute by Haley Stevens, the Democrat congresswoman he had narrowly defeated for the nomination. She sensationally endorsed his Republican rival.

El-Sayed campaigning in Royal Oak, Michigan. He faced a barrage of racism and Islamophobia, including from Donald Trump. Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

El-Sayed cut a dash, too, in his campaign appearances, choosing to dress in a uniform of tight black T-shirts to show off a physique described by the BBC’s North America editor, Sarah Smith, as “jacked”.

It’s all a long way from Bethnal Green where, El-Sayed noted in his Guardian article, the smaller size of British constituencies compared with US electoral districts meant minority groups could more easily make their voices heard.

The larger number of parties competing for seats, too, meant elections became “a community exercise in cohesiveness and solidarity, antithetical to the American electoral climate”. And El-Sayed praised the fact that voters were focused on local concerns rather than being distracted by electing a head of state.

“As an American observer, I thought I knew a thing or two about how a democratic debate is supposed to run …” he wrote. “While there are, undoubtedly, some excellent qualities in American democracy, my first hustings in Bethnal Green and Bow left me just a tad envious – what are the odds they’ll allow an American cast his vote on 6 May?”

They didn’t – and nor did El-Sayed’s British sojourn last. The future senator returned to the US in 2011 after completing his doctorate in public health (and captaining the Oxford lacrosse team against Cambridge, a match in which he got a yellow card).

In the the last of his pieces for the Guardian in January 2011, El-Sayed, who is the son of Egyptian immigrants to the US, challenged Barack Obama over his response to the Arab spring, writing: “When I helped elect you into office as the 44th president of the United States of America, I believed I was doing a service by my country”, and challenging him to support the “freedom fighters” who had risen up against Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak.

After his election on Tuesday, El-Sayed had a message for Trump. In an oft-repeated quip from the campaign trail, he said: “Donald, look, I know you struggled with my name. So after JD [Vance] swears me in in January, you can just go on and call me senator.”