Just before writing this piece, I saw Gary Oldman in a London production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. For those unfamiliar, the play revolves around an old man listening to a series of tapes recorded by himself when he was younger, musing pompously on his hopes and dreams for the future. In his present, desiccated state, he can only scoff at his middle-aged self, before being overcome by the pathetic realisation that it is all up for him and that he is doomed to a miserable, unhappy future.

I suspect that much the same has been going on in Joe Biden’s household of late. If, of course he still knows what day of the week it is, or what his name is. It has transpired that, in preparation for the creation of his uneagerly awaited memoir, Biden read his ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer various documents and notebooks that might have been useful for its writing.

Unfortunately, Biden was unable to distinguish between the kind of long-winded nonsense that a........

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