To the US, where one likely candidate for the presidency delivers hour-long rambling speeches in which he explains that he’s going to be a dictator, but all the chat is about whether the other candidate has lost his marbles. And yes, let me pre-emptively apologise, because I can already tell that we will only be on about the third paragraph of this column before I have exhausted the Guardian’s approved list of euphemisms for being a couple of world leaders’ names short of a full set.

Anyway, our business today is with the president, Joe Biden, who called an impromptu press conference on Thursday night in which he hotly insisted that his memory was just fine. The occasion was the publication of a justice department report that cleared Biden of criminal charges over his handling of highly classified materials. This year-long investigation was carried out by special counsel Robert Hur, who happens to be a registered Republican, and whose report specifically mentions the president’s “significantly limited” memory. Mr Hur says that part of the reason he didn’t bring charges was that “at trial, Mr Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Oh dear. A real muffin-basket of an attack-line gifted to Donald Trump there, and confirmation of my long-held conviction that fake sympathy is far deadlier a tone than open attack.

Biden had almost left the stage last night when he returned to the podium to take a question on the Israel-Gaza conflict, in which he unfortunately referred to the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi........

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