Joe Biden is not a candidate ‘yet’, but if that changes he’ll have to do better than this

The former vice president said the world was facing a series of ‘moonshot questions’, but didn’t seem to have worked out the world is looking to him for the moonshot answers

A gentle tremor of high-pitched laughter in the corner by the doorway announced the ex-vice-president’s arrival, 15 minutes late.

The biggest fish always move inside a motorcade of generalised sycophancy and Joe Biden is no exception. Hands were shaken, throwaway comments were met with significantly more laughter than they deserve. He even paused on his way to the stage in London’s Chatham House, to sign an outstretched book.

None of it’s his fault, mind you. People are just overwhelmingly pleased to meet him.

The first thing you cannot help noticing is that the potential 46th president of the United States is not a young man. His black eyes shine out from his head like two precious stones found half-buried on a sandy beach. His hair is a metaphor for Democratic politics laid out in spun silver. Clearly, there is not enough to go around, but great care has evidently been taken to ensure that no area goes entirely neglected.

Undimmed by time, however, is his broad grin, which would not look out of place on a prized racing camel. No profession has realised the American Dream more fully than its dentists and Biden is their Mona Lisa. His teeth feel like a work of cultural significance; great white monoliths, shaped by man on the lathe of nature. Eventually one imagines the call will come from the Smithsonian institution: “We’re sorry sir, but we can’t allow you to eat your dinner with those any longer. They’re too important.” At that point they’ll require their own visitors centre, ideally not too near the A303 through Wiltshire or the traffic will grind to a halt for miles in both directions.

He described himself, when asked the only question anyone had come to here answered, as “not a candidate, at this point.” If he does become a candidate, and a successful one, he would enter the Oval office at the age of 78, the same age at which Reagan left it.

But to listen to him speak, and to be in his presence, it is not immediately obvious what qualities his years are meant to have stripped from him. Whatever it is, he hasn’t got, it’s not there to be seen in rival politicians 30 years his junior: He’s articulate, intelligent, and oozing with charisma.

One of the tropes of men, and it is usually but not always men, at this level of global significance, is the laying on of hands. It’s not necessarily sexual. Macron and Trump are quite literally all over each other every time they meet. George W Bush and Vladimir Putin were the same. Goldman Sachs bankers are even taught to do it in special seminars.

At one point, at the end, when he went to say hello to a journalist from CNN, his elevated position on the platform meant all he could offer is a curious sheep-like nuzzle of his forehead against hers. If ever you find yourself talking to Joe Biden, it is approaching certainty that the two of you will be in physical contact in some way.

He spoke at length on his “vision for the future of the transatlantic relationship”, a relationship which has been radically altered by two political earthquakes, two years ago, one on either side of the Atlantic.

He said he’d been speaking to Theresa May the night before, and come to the conclusion that Brexit, which has split both major parties and must pass through a parliament which fundamentally does not support it, was an “intractable problem”.

He made the point, made many times before by others of his political stripe, that “US interests are diminished with Great Britain not an integral part of Europe,” and that “the prosperity of the transatlantic partnership rests on Britain’s influence in Europe”.

The problem, though, is that this vision for the transatlantic future is a vision of the transatlantic past. In a long speech, Biden correctly set out a series of challenges facing America and Europe, as both places struggle with the rise of populism, and find themselves becoming “more uncertain” and “more nervous of the future” than he says he can “ever remember.”

This, by the way, from a man who was first elected to the United States Senate in 1972, aged 29, nine presidents ago.

He dissected the changes that have come and the challenges they have brought with them into a series of “moonshot questions”.

The future poses threats: “From automation, from lethal autonomous weapons, from the rise of technology that has divorced labour from productivity.” He said it twice for emphasis. He means that ordinary workers don’t feel like they can’t work hard to get ahead.

He spoke of a friend from “grade school”, who he saw recently, who’d worked as a trucker, and who by the time he retired was earning $120,000 a year, who told him his son, also a trucker, doesn’t expect to have a job in five years time.

He spoke of a couple he’d met, both on around $50,000, working in a retail store, both out of a job at 50 years old. “That’s because of Amazon,” he said. “Now they’re not bad guys, but that’s because of Amazon”.

There was the devastating statistic, heard many time before, that in five years in the late sixties and early seventies, real wages in America rose by 97 per cent. In the forty years since they’ve risen 12 per cent.

That is the statistic that underpins the four words written on baseball caps all over America.

When that happens, he said: “Demagogues and charlatans step up to prey on people’s fears. They provide incomplete information. They tell people the reason for their worries is the immigrant.”

Which they do, but they will take whatever information they are offered. The challenge looks abundantly clear. This “not yet candidate” will need to find the moonshot answers, not the moonshot questions.

“There are answers,” he claimed. “Lifelong education. Infrastructure. Healthcare”. Governments could create well-paid jobs by getting America to do something about the fact that “it ranks 20th in the world on public transportation.”

But these, to be frank, do not feel like the answers that will defeat a man who can be caught out bragging about sexual assault and win the presidency all the same.

He spoke of a “battle for the soul of America”. He spoke about the notorious white supremacy rally in Charlottesville: “There were Nazi sympathisers, white supremacists, and then they were confronted by people who opposed them, and you hear leaders talking about moral equivalency, you know. ‘There are good people on both sides’”.He did not mention Trump by name, but these are the specific words the president used at the time.

He carried on: “When you guys watch, on the Mexican border, children being ripped from the arms of their mothers, what do you guys think of that? What do you think of our capacity to show leadership in the world?”

Joe Biden is not a candidate, not yet. And this was not a rally, not a campaign event. But if he is to be, and if there is a fight to come, then it cannot be ignored that “the battle for the soul of America” comes with a certain deja vu. It’s “anyone but Trump”. It’s been tried before, and it did not work.