Why did Biden cling on for so long? Because power is delicious and he was addicted to it

There’s one word to explain why Joe Biden had been defying all known laws of political gravity for so long. Power. It’s delicious. It can consume every minute of every day. It’s highly addictive. It’s very easy to consider yourself utterly indispensable, if not possessed of a unique, divine purpose.  

Without it, nothing lies ahead but darkness.

But no one within a democratic system that I’ve ever come across, at home or abroad, has been willing to go through what Theodore Roosevelt called the “dust and sweat and blood” of high office – unless they are ready to spend themselves “in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly”. 

Yes, Biden was addicted to his power. But that’s entirely understandable. Who wouldn’t be?

A US president is the most powerful leader in the world because they are commander-in-chief of the world’s strongest armed forces, with twice the spending of China, and dwarfing that of the whole of the EU and UK combined, built in turn on the world’s strongest, and most innovative economy. They literally hold the future of mankind in their fingers. 

But in many areas, their discretion is far more fettered than that of a UK prime minister with a majority in the Commons. A president is beholden to Congress for money, and even his discretion on foreign policy may be seriously constrained by the Senate.

As a senior British minister under two administrations, my personal contact with both President Clinton, and then President Bush, was limited. But I saw enough to be struck by the apparently eerie calm around the president.

There was a buzz around the staff in the West Wing, for sure, but I witnessed