Joe Biden on why he didn't run for president in 2016: I couldn't win

Although he is in the running for the presidency in 2020, Joe Biden conceded that the reason he decided not to stand for US president in 2016 is that he didn't believe he could have won.

In a joint interview with his wife Dr Jill Biden on CBS' 60 Minutes in October 2015, he revealed:

I'll be very blunt. If I thought we could've put together the campaign that our supporters deserve and our contributors deserved, I would have gone ahead and done it.

He added of front-runner Hillary Clinton:

I've said from the beginning, 'Look, I like Hillary. Hillary and I get along together'. The only reason to run is because I still think I could do a better job than anybody else could do.

Biden also denied that his son Beau, who died that summer aged 46 from brain cancer, had pleaded with him to run for the Oval Office:

Nothing like that ever, ever happened. Beau all along thought that I should run and I could win.

But there was not what was sort of made out as kind of this Hollywood-esque thing that, at the last minute, Beau grabbed my hand and said, 'Dad, you've got to run'.

Biden became the Democratic candidate for the presidency earlier this year after all of his opponents dropped out of the running. However, the former vice president's campaign has already been dogged with controversy which Trump has been more than happy to exploit.