Joe Biden’s hostility to Britain only harms the United States

This week Joe Biden is swanning around Ireland in what must be, according to his Irish-American fantasies, the climax of his foreign policy agenda. As part of his trip he is due to spend only half a day in Belfast, before dedicating two and a half days to Ireland.

While most US presidents pride themselves on being ‘American as apple pie’, Biden identifies as ‘Irish as Paddy’s pig’. There are some in America, where those of Irish descent are a significant demographic, who find this quaint. But indulging his distant inherited grievance at the cost of a strong relationship with Britain, our most stalwart of allies, is pernicious and self-indulgent.

Joe Biden’s cognitive challenges are now overwhelmingly apparent to anyone not deliberately overlooking them. But his deep-seated animosity for mother England – to whom we Yanks owe everything for setting the foundations of the globe’s once most successful and freest democracy – well predates the onset of this.