Watching an American Election from Across the Pond

Roman Road, in London’s East End, is a busy thoroughfare just south of Victoria Park. It sits on the bones of an ancient route used by the Romans, but is better known for its scruffy outdoor market and historical proximity to jellied eels. (“One of the great market streets in London,” the reformer Charles Booth wrote, in 1887. “Things to be bought of every sort, even patent leather shoes.”) At Cafe Zealand, a friendly neighborhood place, it might be possible—if you hide your phone—to briefly forget about the turmoil of American politics. That is, until Louisa Compton, who lives nearby, arrives in a navy boilersuit and sequinned sneakers. As the head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, Compton has the difficult task of making the weirder aspects of the U.S. election process legible to a British audience. On the day we met for lunch, exactly one week before Election Day, she had been preparing for the channel’s marathon Election Night coverage. “We’ve got eight hours to fill, but I think it’ll fly by,” she told me.

Any American expat hoping to avoid discussion of the former President’s chances of reëlection will be disappointed. Last week, at Heathrow, a British Airways flight was delayed after two women got into an altercation reportedly over a MAGA cap. (“Enquiries are ongoing,” the Metropolitan Police told me, by e-mail.) I have been asked about gerrymandering and the Electoral College in London pubs and Greek tavernas. Everyone wants to know what’s going on. “A lot of our job will be explaining it clearly,” Compton said, over a cup of strong black builder’s tea. “For Brits, it’s mad that a country of three hundred and fifty million people is going to come down to, potentially, a couple of hundred thousand votes in a few swing states.”

Compton’s plans are ballsy, with a lineup that might make an American network jealous. Guests scheduled to stop by the channel’s studio in Washington, D.C., include the adult-film star Stormy Daniels; Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen; and Sean Spicer, his former press secretary. Who else? Boris Johnson and Malcolm Turnbull, former Prime Ministers of the U.K. and Australia, respectively. John Bolton, Trump’s former national-security adviser, who has since called him “unfit to be President,” will be there. So will the actor Brian Cox, from “Succession,” and the musician Rufus Wainwright. The British journalist Emily Maitlis, who co-presents the politics podcast “The News Agents,” will anchor the coverage from D.C., with Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy. A team in London will be “crunching the numbers” in partnership with CNN, and reporters will be installed in seven swing states. “It’s a huge operation,” Compton told me. She was buzzing.

Some of the splashier guests have raised eyebrows in the U.K. When the channel announced that Johnson had been booked, it drew the ire of progressives on X. Compton was sanguine. “Social media is so binary,” she said. “If you don’t vote Conservative, and you don’t particularly rate Boris Johnson, you go on social media to make a noise about it. But we’re a duly impartial broadcaster, and it’s our job to give our audience a range of views.” (British public broadcasters are required to be politically neutral. In the U.K., they are also barred from speculating on results before the polls close on Election Day, which leads to a lot of enthusiastic coverage of pets at polling stations.) There was a similar outcry when the channel announced that Nadine Dorries, a former Conservative M.P., who served as Johnson’s Culture Secretary, would be a guest on its U.K. election coverage. “But people still watched,” Compton said.

Tuesday’s broadcast will be the channel’s first overnight coverage of a U.S. election in thirty-two years, Compton told me. The decision speaks to just how important the election is for Brits. “I mean, British audiences are always interested in American elections, for obvious reasons—you know, shared language, shared culture—but this election feels like the stakes are so much higher,” she said. “Everywhere I go, everyone I speak to is asking about the American election. It’s a real sitting-on-the-edge-of-your-seat moment.”

Our food had arrived. A Mexican-bean wrap for Compton, and the veggie breakfast—a daunting platter with eggs, halloumi, and hash browns, which Compton had recommended—for me. “Oh, fab, that looks amazing,” she said, eying my plate. “I definitely have envy.” She’s often at the café for brunch, with her partner and her partner’s two-year-old daughter. (She was up with the toddler at seven A.M., dancing to a mechanical sloth.) Compton, who is forty-seven, has worked her way up Channel 4, acquiring an unwieldy title that encompasses news, current affairs, “specialist factual” content, and sports. At any one time, she oversees about a hundred and fifty newsroom staffers and a dozen commissioned films, some of them part of an investigation unit she launched in 2022. Her leadership has paid off: this year, Channel 4 News picked up a BAFTA, an International Emmy, and a few Royal Television Society journalism awards. “A royal flush,” she said.

She hasn’t shied away from controversy. Last year, Compton oversaw the release of “Russell Brand: In Plain Sight,” a years-long “passion project” that investigated the comedian’s treatment of women—including women who had worked at Channel 4. In June, the network ran an impactful segment on Reform UK, the far-right party headed by Nigel Farage. An undercover Channel 4 correspondent captured video footage of Reform campaigners making racist and homophobic remarks. It was so well covered in the U.K. that the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, made an emotional statement addressing the comments, some of which were directed toward him. “I’m a big believer in undercover,” Compton said. “When executed properly, it gives an insight into a world that you would never get if you were filming openly.”

Compton was raised by her mother, a probation officer, in Bedfordshire, north of London. Even as a child, she was obsessive about the news. Once, when she was home sick from school, she learned that Margaret Thatcher had resigned. “I remember ringing my mum up to tell her—because I’d seen it on the lunchtime news—to tell her she’d resigned, and feeling that thrill of breaking a story,” she said. “I think, somehow, that’s always stayed with me.” She got a work placement at a radio station, and eventually joined BBC Radio 5 Live, before moving to television. Unlike many of her peers, Compton didn’t attend university. “It was always like a dirty secret,” she told me. “I spent years of my career avoiding the question.” Now she sees it as a strength. “It makes me work harder,” she said. “I also think it makes me look at stories differently. I don’t have the baggage of ‘this is how you do things.’ ” She has tried to make the coverage she oversees less exclusive. “I’m always aware there’s an awful lot of assumed knowledge.”

We had chosen a table outside, and the sky had grown overcast. London in October. Trucks trundled by loudly, but Compton seemed unfazed. I sensed she would be good in a crisis. Already that morning, she’d put out a fire. A film crew had had their equipment stolen as they returned from a shoot. “Every day is different, but it’s always just constant, constant, constant,” she said. “It’s hard in a job like this to get the headspace to think about the future, but I try and make sure I’m always thinking, O.K., what’s our next big story? What’s our next iteration?”

In the past, Channel 4’s election coverage has leaned into the broadcaster’s reputation for eclecticism. (Part of the channel’s remit is to provide alternative programming that appeals to young people.) During the U.K.’s general election in 2019, for instance, the channel set up an “Alternative News Desk” on a show co-hosted by the comedian Katherine Ryan. Ahead of this year’s U.K. election, Compton wanted to try something new. “We thought, We’re going to try and do something completely different. We’re going to be serious,” she told me.

They invited Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, the co-hosts of the popular podcast “The Rest Is Politics,” on as guests. The coverage’s tone was informed, but conversational, and it yielded results. The network doubled its audience share from the previous election, and tripled its share of young viewers. Compton told me she has “always felt really angry when people would say young people don’t care about news.” “I genuinely think this generation of young people are more engaged in news than any other generation,” she said. “It comes to them all the time, it’s at their fingertips, and they’re chatting to the world. They’re much more engaged, they just want news presented in a different way. A less formal way.”