Joe Biden has known deep personal pain. His infant daughter and first wife died in a car accident in 1972 and his son Beau died in 2015 from a brain tumour at the age of 46. He has suffered political defeat, trying and failing to become president twice, in 1998 and 2008. He has had emergency surgery for a brain aneurysm. He’s been caught plagiarising. He did poorly in law school. He stuttered as a child. And few American politicians have so regularly made cringe-inducing gaffes in public.

But perhaps Biden is exactly the flawed, human, humbled figure America needs right now as president in the post-Trump era, and as the pandemic continues to kill thousands of Americans every day. In April 2021 Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker, came to Intelligence Squared to discuss Biden’s life and explore what actions the 78-year-old is likely to take as he tries to unite the troubled, grieving nation he now leads.