Joe Biden’s bitter handover speech will leave a stain on his reputation

He finally said it, right at the end of a speech that confirmed the wisdom of those who forced him to step aside as the Democratic Party’s candidate: he was “too old to stay as president”. Joe Biden has not, until now, given a reason for his withdrawal from the election.

It was a poor speech, not because he slurred his words and stumbled over phrases, but because it was one-note – literally a single, slightly shouted tone, but also metaphorically: one long, self-righteous tirade tinged with bitterness.

On the surface, the anger was aimed at Donald Trump and the threat he poses to democracy, but it wasn’t hard to hear the resentment at being pushed out of the arena to which Biden has devoted his entire adult life.

It was audible despite the repeated tributes to “Kamala and Tim”. He opened by asking delegates at the Democratic National Convention if they were “ready to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz”. (They were.) He boasted of his record in office: “We have had one of the most extraordinary periods of progress ever – when I say ‘we’, I mean Kamala and me.”

He gave the “vice-president-soon-to-be-president” star billing in the story of how “we finally beat Big Pharma”, as she cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to cut prescription drug prices.

She was even the beneficiary of the only humour in the 45-minute speech. “Like many of our best presidents, she was also a vice-president,” he said, referring to his eight years as Barack Obama’s deputy. “That’s a joke,” he added, too hastily.

But everyone knows that he had to be pushed into giving way to her. The Democratic Party’s guilt about what it, collectively, had done to its leader was expressed in an extravagant display of gratitude. The start of his speech, already