Back in 2017, Joe Biden kept a poker face about whether he would run for president, says Edward-Isaac Dovere in The Atlantic. “Guys, I’m not running,” he told a group of supporters and journalists in April 2017. Behind closed doors, he was more confident, telling friends: “If I’m walking, I’m running.”
Boris’s housing problem
I spy a problem for the runaway Tories, says Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times. Young people can’t buy homes, and if you don’t build homes, you don’t create Conservative voters. But nothing enrages traditional Tory voters more than “new homes spoiling the view”. So it’s a Catch-22, with the party’s MPs split on how to deal with it. Fortunately for them, Labour now looks so far from power, “you’d need to borrow some equipment from Nasa to make it out”.
The demon drink
Higher alcohol prices have significantly reduced consumption in Scotland, but junior health minister Lord Bethell is curiously opposed to introducing them in England, says Private Eye. “We must be careful of… demonising those who drink responsibly,” said Bethell, a former manager of the Ministry of Sound nightclub whose wife happens to be a non-executive director of alcohol giant Diageo.