Michigan senator-elect’s former peers recall his time at university in Britain – and his love of coronation chicken sandwiches

In the cold, twilight days of 2008, inside the University of Michigan’s fortress-like Fleming administration building, one student was given a particularly adulatory sendoff.

Mary Sue Coleman, president of the university at the time, convened a ceremony for the latest Rhodes scholar heading to the University of Oxford: Abdul El-Sayed. “There is no doubt among anyone who crosses his path that he will achieve all he sets out to accomplish and more,” she declared to a room full of the university’s leaders, calling the medical PhD student the “epitome of the engaged intellect”.

In a Guardian article in 2010, the Oxford Rhodes scholar said UK democracy had the ‘upper hand’ over the US

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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.