Joe Biden was never quite all there

As President Biden sank more deeply into the mire this month, kind friends kept urging me to write in his defence, because respect for the old must be maintained in our discourteous society. ‘And why does it matter,’ they added, ‘if he muddles up everyone’s name? We know who he means.’ ‘It’s like sacking the warden of New College for Spoonerisms,’ said one. I nearly succumbed; but since I had observed as early as the mid-1980s that Biden was not quite all there, I did not feel I could stick up for his underlying cognitive coherence nearly 40 years later. Besides, if Donald Trump wins, America will still have an old President, possibly a raging King Lear, with the major difference that he will not have handed on his kingdom to his children in his lifetime. But it is true that being over 80 is not a fault, or even, in all respects, a disadvantage. Old people, rather like little children, are likelier to tell the truth. If they have a job, they do not treat it, as so many younger people do (think Mark Carney or George Osborne) as a springboard for a more lucrative one. They want it to be their last, best thing. What the old are bad at, though, is running things in daily detail. They are better suited for being non-executive chairmen, kings, popes, David Attenborough-figures. And they shouldn’t hurry. Biden’s habit of entering the stage doing a mock run drew attention to the problems of his age rather than rising serenely above them.

I cannot honestly say I shall miss Biden, except for the passing of a certain type of Democrat politician – jocular, Irish, Catholic, Atlanticist, unideological, sentimental, tough, sexist, unashamed to look after ‘our ain folk’. He came from a world in which mayors and convention delegates were more important than spin-doctors and super-donors.