When President Biden arrives in Britain tomorrow, much pomp and circumstance will be rolled out to make him welcome.

Nobody will mention the fact that he did not come to our first Coronation since 1953. He slighted Charles and Camilla by sending Jill Biden, the First Lady, instead. Was that a petty act of revenge for their refusal to give him pride of place at the late Queen’s funeral?

As a guest at Windsor on Monday, we may be certain that the President will be warmly greeted by the King and Queen, and the meeting is being viewed as an olive branch offering on behalf of Biden. Joe will turn on his folksy charm and crack a joke and Charles will chuckle politely.

Rishi Sunak will be cordial too, even though the King’s octogenarian guest has the devil of a time getting his name right.

So far, the Prime Minister’s diplomacy has made little impression in the Biden White House. Luckily we don’t play cricket with the Americans.

There is the usual waffle in our media about the “Special Relationship”. Across the Atlantic, the President’s visit will be treated merely as a stopover en route to the Nato summit at Vilnius, the real purpose of his trip.

The elephant in the room

Vilnius will take place amid the fallout from a Telegraph scoop. Biden is reported to have chosen Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission President, in preference to Ben Wallace, our doughty Defence Secretary, to succeed the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg as secretary general of NATO.

Mrs von der Leyen, the EU’s most powerful official, emerged as the unlikely candidate after Nato allies failed to agree on a successor.

The US President, who traditionally gifts the alliance’s top civilian role to Europe, sees her as a candidate its 31 member states can all get behind.

Her transatlantic outlook has seen Mrs von der Leyen shun shoddy European intelligence led by her native Germany and France, which misjudged Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for advice by US spymasters.


The move has seen the EU chief ignore her own foreign service, the European External Action Service, which has been denied access to sensitive data amid fears pro-Russian states, such as Hungary and Bulgaria, will leak the details to Moscow.

Vladimir Putin will be cracking open the Crimean champagne at the notion of a Eurocrat of legendary incompetence running the alliance on which our security depends.

Years ago Mrs von der Leyen was kicked upstairs by her patron, Angela Merkel, after it emerged that the Bundeswehr had been conducting exercises using broomsticks for rifles. But the sorceress’s apprentice has been scarcely less accident-prone in Brussels.

Her vaccine rollout, her first major role as EU boss, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic saw members of the European Parliament call for her head a year into the job.

And then her eagerness to push through sanctions on Russia saw her create huge divisions amongst the EU’s 27 member states, when she was seen to have gone too far by the likes of Germany, Italy and Hungary.

But Joe Biden likes her and that counts for more than military expertise.

The Irish ‘special relationship’

So what lies behind the ritual and the rhetoric? The truth is that the UK still does matter to most of the American élites. To the President of the United States? Not so much.

When Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries marched on Moscow last month, Washington gave London advance warning of the mutiny. The Americans shared this intelligence with no other allies: not even the other three members of the “Five Eyes” alliance (Canada, Australia and New Zealand), and certainly not the French or Germans.

The fact that we even know about this implies that senior Biden administration officials want to send a signal of loyalty and trust to their counterparts in the UK.

Why? Because Joe Biden, by contrast, has made it abundantly clear what he thinks of the British. His condescension, his distrust and his distaste are visceral.

His response to a British reporter in 2020 says it all: “BBC? I’m Irish!”

Biden’s Irish roots are the heart of his personal and political identity. The first Catholic president since Kennedy, he is proud of his descent from Irish immigrants who came to America to escape the Great Famine (1845-49).

When Biden sees a British politician, he sees a descendant of Lord John Russell, the Whig prime minister, and his Irish Secretary Charles Trevelyan, whose inadequate response to the potato blight was blamed for the deaths of a million people from starvation, disease and malnutrition. A million more emigrated. Among the refugees from the famine were Biden’s maternal ancestors: 10 of his 16 great-great grandparents were Irish.

Long before his ambitions extended to the White House, Biden built his career as one of the longest-serving senators in Congressional history on the formidable Irish-American vote.


Some 31.5 million of his compatriots (about 10 per cent of the US population) trace their ancestry to Ireland. Traditionally, they vote Democrat. Since 1972 they have voted for Biden. In 2020 they did so again – overwhelmingly.

Since Brexit, the Irish-American lobby in Congress has been reactivated. There are still Democrats like Pete King, the former New York Representative who once described the IRA as “the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland”.

Joe Biden doesn’t need to be lobbied: he is part of the Irish-American lobby. Three years ago he declared: “We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement to become a casualty of Brexit.”

More recently, in the negotiations that led up to the Windsor agreement on the Northern Ireland Protocol, the President made it obvious that he saw his role as protecting the Republic’s interests against the conniving British.

In May he told a reception for the Democratic National Committee that he had gone to Belfast and Dublin in April to “make sure the Brits didn’t screw around and Northern Ireland didn’t walk away from their commitments”.

In fact, it was Biden who showed insensitivity to what he vaguely called the “Irish accords” during his visit. For example, he flouted diplomatic protocol by flying the Irish flag alongside the Stars and Stripes on his car in Dublin, after having refused to fly the Union flag in Belfast.

Even more revealing was one of his gaffes while in County Louth, when he referred to the New Zealand rugby team, the All-Blacks, as the “Black and Tans” – a British paramilitary force that gained notoriety during the Irish War of Independence a century ago.

British snub

As President, Biden never had much time for the first British PM he had to deal with, Boris Johnson, whom he described as “a kind of physical and emotional clone” of Donald Trump. When Johnson resigned last year, Biden couldn’t even bear to mention him by name.

As for Liz Truss: he scuppered her attempts to negotiate a trade deal and was quick to exploit the mini-budget debacle for domestic purposes. “I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake,” he crowed, adding that he “disagreed” with “cutting taxes on the super-wealthy” – the “trickle-down” economics he caricatures as Reaganomics.

Of course Biden dislikes British Conservative prime ministers, you may say. Yet, although he champions liberal causes such as abortion rights and gun control, on the American political spectrum the President is a centrist.

He may romanticise his Irish ancestors, but he takes a robust view of present-day immigrants who try to cross the Mexican border. Like his former boss, Barack Obama, Biden is actually to the right of Sunak on migration.

Even on the economy, there is little to choose between them. Both have presided over astronomical levels of taxation, spending and debt, although Biden has a slightly superior record on inflation and growth.

So it is less ideology that distances Biden from Sunak than ingrained prejudice. Yet in a time of global peril, Biden seldom misses an opportunity to snub the British, even to the detriment of the Atlantic alliance.

Earlier this year, Ben Wallace discreetly offered himself as the next Nato secretary general. He quickly gained support from the European countries most at risk from Putin’s Russia. Paris and Berlin were predictably hostile, but it was Washington’s veto that surprised British officials.

“We’re supposed to be their closest ally. And this is what we get,” one Whitehall official commented. There is little doubt that the snub originated not in the State Department or the Pentagon, but in the White House.


Yet Biden himself had described Wallace publicly as “very well-qualified” for the post, which has not been held by a Briton for a generation. Given that the UK is the only major Western military power, apart from Poland and the US itself, that spends 2 per cent of GDP on defence – supposedly NATO’s minimum requirement – the case for Wallace seemed unassailable.

Washington, for NATO's 74-year-existence, has been seen as Europe’s main security guarantor.

Over the years, the US has hoped for the likes of Germany, France and the UK to plug that gap eventually. But underspending in Europe, mainly by Berlin, has been a constant thorn in the side of the White House.

Only Donald Trump dared to challenge failures to meet Nato’s 2 per cent spending target, prompting fears the US could pull out of the alliance altogether, leaving Europe lacking a trillion dollar spender on defence.

Last week it was reported that the President blocked Wallace and plumped for Mrs von der Leyen for a specific reason: the decision to go ahead with training Ukrainian pilots in US-built F-16 aircraft without his approval.

Wallace led the way in building an international coalition dedicated to supplying the jets to Ukraine – a step too far, it seems, for Biden. The Defence Secretary had forced the pace in previous Nato standoffs, too.


Perhaps these rows had left Biden feeling bruised. Maybe he thinks silky Mrs von der Leyen will be more biddable than bluff Captain Wallace. Yet it is hard to avoid the impression that his fundamental problem with Wallace was that the former Scots Guard had served during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

In 1993, Wallace was mentioned in dispatches after his patrol captured an IRA unit attempting to bomb soldiers. Everything we know about Biden’s immersion in Irish Republican mythology suggests that for this reason alone he would find the British Defence Secretary antipathetic.

The ‘Grand Old Man’

The presidential blind spot where Britain is concerned does not disqualify Biden from holding his high office. Indeed, he has been consistently underestimated by his critics.

But it is indicative of a flawed strategic judgement and an inability to rise fully to the challenges facing the United States and the West. The President likes to point out that he came to the job with more experience than any of his predecessors. But it comes with an attitude that is simply anachronistic. Biden is a man of the first half of the 20th century living in the third decade of the 21st century. That would be just fine – many readers might say the same – if he weren’t also the most powerful man on earth.

The present Potus is by no means the worst we might have. He is neither a narcissist, a megalomaniac, nor a predator. He isn’t mendacious or paranoid. His predecessor and likely opponent next year, Donald Trump, is all of those things and stands accused of serious crimes to boot. Unlike Trump, Biden upholds the US Constitution and he takes his duties seriously.

But at 86, he is already the oldest president in American history. By the time he left office in 2028 he would be 85. To elect him for another four years is a real gamble.

Other, even older people have held high office before with success. Konrad Adenauer rebuilt West Germany in the decades after the war and was 87 when he stepped down (reluctantly) in 1963. It’s not impossible that Biden could last the course.
As Commander in Chief, though, he is seriously out of his depth. You don’t need to believe Republican conspiracy theorists or Putin propagandists to see why this man is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The problem is not senility, but seniority – and the arrogance of experience that goes with it. This man of versatile but limited intellect is convinced that more than half a century in politics not only enables him to grasp the world better than anyone else, but also entitles him to “more excuses”.

No, Joe, it doesn’t. There is a war on – the bloodiest in Europe since 1945 – and the West has not been so embattled since he was a young man. Our plight is too precarious, the stakes are too high, for such self-indulgence in the Oval Office.


Those who know Biden find the garrulous pomposity of his Grand Old Man act insufferable.

During a visit to the UK while he was vice-president, about a decade ago, David Cameron invited Biden to attend a meeting of his newly established National Security Council. Such meetings normally take from 11am to 1pm. A Cabinet minister who was present told me what happened.

Biden duly arrived with his motorcade, was welcomed by Cameron and invited to say a few words. An hour later, at noon, he had not finished with Europe. At one o’clock, he was still on the Middle East, with East Asia and the Pacific yet to come. By then, one elder statesman had dozed off and had to be poked in the ribs. Not until 2pm did Biden sit down, after which the PM hastily thanked him. The VP beamed and departed with his motorcade, well-satisfied with his morning’s work. Dazed, parched and ravenous, the council members fled.

If Biden’s only vice were that he is too fond of the sound of his own voice, it would be forgivable. But this one is not only loquacious but incorrigible.

Biden concluded a speech last month in Chicago with a story about Xi Jinping. He boasted that when they were both vice-presidents, he spent 68 hours with his Chinese counterpart, much of it in the mountains of Tibet. “By the way, I turned in all my notes,” he ad-libbed, getting a laugh at the expense of Trump, now facing trial for hanging on to classified documents.

But the point of the story was to recall how Xi asked him to define America. Biden replied in one word: “Possibilities.” To applause, he added: “It’s never been a good bet to bet against America.”

Except, of course, if you are the Vietcong, the Ayatollahs, the Taliban or – as Xi will have observed – the Chinese and the Russians.

Biden learned how to manage Congress from Lyndon Johnson, the greatest fixer of them all – but he didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam, which destroyed LBJ’s presidency. Nor did he learn from the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, which destroyed Jimmy Carter’s.

If Biden learnt any lessons from Bill Clinton’s belated interventions in the Balkans, he had forgotten them again by the time Barack Obama and he allowed Putin to march first into Syria and then Crimea with impunity.

The abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban in 2021 was as shameful a humiliation for the West as any of these.

Admittedly, Trump had planned to do the same: but it happened on Biden’s watch.

How is Taiwan to stand firm against mainland China if its main ally, the US, is so unreliably led? Xi will have taken more from his conversations with Biden than anecdotes. In fact, he may well have concluded that the Biden presidency is his only window to seize the coveted offshore island.

The President’s Putin miscalculation

The failure of Nato to deter Putin in the period before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine must rank as the worst foreign policy disaster of modern times.

Biden was given plenty of warning, not least by Boris Johnson (who had been convinced by Ben Wallace), that the threat was real and imminent. He ignored even his own intelligence experts until it was too late.

Biden wasn’t the only culprit – Merkel, Macron, Scholz and others must all share the blame – but as Potus he had the primary responsibility to stop what he must have known would be a war for Ukraine’s existence. If the Ukrainians had been armed with a fraction of the arsenal that the US and its allies have given since, would Putin have attacked?

The fact that he not only offered to rescue Volodymyr Zelensky from Kyiv but was surprised when the Ukrainian President refused (“I need ammunition, not a ride”) shows how little Biden understood the man and his people.

Biden’s overcaution and equivocation have persisted since – thereby encouraging Putin to keep pushing. After Bucha was recaptured, when the genocidal aspects of the war came into focus, the US should have led the West to take immediate steps to enable the Ukrainians to defeat Russian forces and to impose penal sanctions to choke off Putin’s economy.


Instead, Biden has only grudgingly conceded every increase in Ukraine’s firepower, implying that Putin’s nuclear blackmail is succeeding. When genocide was followed by ecocide, as Russians sabotaged the dams on the Dnipro to slow the Ukrainian advance, Washington hardly reacted.

As a result of such weakness, not only Ukraine but the whole of Europe, including the UK, now face an existential danger: the destruction of the six nuclear reactors at Zaporizhzhia by the Russians, who have already mined the area. This huge “dirty bomb” would be much worse than Chernobyl.

Does Biden grasp that it is his responsibility to make deterrence work again? Is he confused by a nightmarish predicament?

Americans may forgive him lapses of memory or judgment, but not a failing moral compass.

Joe Biden is a vain man, but not a bad one. The reason why, for all his undoubted achievements, his presidency will be judged harshly by historians is that at a crucial moment, he could not offer the bold certainty, the uncompromising leadership, that the times demanded. “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound who shall prepare himself to the battle?”

One thing Biden understands is unity. He has championed a Nato whose togetherness is its main asset, when Moscow hopes to divide the West.

The US President rejected Wallace, not only because of his misgivings with Britain over military aid, but because the likes of France and Germany would not want to see Brexit Britain rewarded on the main stage.

And Ursula von der Leyen? Well, she’s a woman – and a close friend of Jill, the First Lady, who reportedly insisted to her husband that Nato should have its first female secretary general. Incompetence does not, it seem, bar one from the highest of offices.