So, which of Joe Biden’s gaffes yesterday was the more hair-raising? Confusing Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky with Russia’s Vladimir Putin? At least there he corrected himself swiftly, though it was still bad enough to cause the Ukrainian president to cancel his press conference. Or was it confusing vice-president Kamala Harris with Donald Trump? That was an error which neither of them can have been gratified by. Ronald Reagan may have suffered age-related memory lapses too but he had compensating strengths which Biden lacks.
From quite early on in his career, Biden was known as the “gaffe-machine from Delaware” or, as the New York Post put it, “the Lamborghini of gaffes”. But at a time when the Nato alliance gathered in Washington was seeking proof that the leader of the free world is up to the challenges ahead, from the conflict in Gaza to war in Ukraine, this was not a wholly convincing performance, notwithstanding his hour-long speech.
It falls now to his staff, his party and his friends to advise the president — as the actor George Clooney has already done — that he is a liability to his party and, more importantly, to his country. It’s time to speak truth to power.
Serving time
The prospect that prisoners on fixed-term sentences will only serve 40 per cent of their time rather than half is downright worrying. The Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is announcing emergency measures to ease drastic overcrowding in prisons. And so, except for serious violent and sexual offenders, prisoners will be released after less than half their sentence.
No one doubts, as the PM puts it, that “there are far too many prisoners for the prison places we have got”. More concretely, male prisons are dangerously close to capacity with only 700-odd places available. But the solution is not to release prisoners prematurely en masse, but to engage in a programme of prison building and meanwhile to use every available facility to create further capacity to house inmates. There is a case for not putting people in prison for trivial offences, but many prisoners are in fact multiple offenders, and they should serve at least half their time.
Spoilt for choice
The spoilsports at Wimbledon are refusing to allow big public screens to watch the football on Sunday on the basis that Wimbledon is for tennis, not football. Yet how often does it happen that the final of the Euros is on the same day as the men’s tennis final? It is, frankly, unlikely that there will be a clash between the two events, but if the men’s final is that thrilling no one will watch anything else.
