There’s no point sugarcoating it: the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was a complete mess. Biden was listless, frail and confused. Trump was defiant, ranting and often incoherent. Kim Darroch, Britain’s former ambassador to the United States, summed it up well. ‘Every answer from Trump, if you listen to them carefully, is a mixture of wild exaggeration and total fantasy…his performance is pretty terrible too, but it was fluent and confident nonsense rather than stumbling, losing my train of thought nonsense.’