David Cameron took a holiday in Lanzarote. What was he thinking?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/02/david-cameron-holiday-lanzarote-politicians

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Spare a thought for our political masters. There is never a good time for them to go on holiday. Especially a foreign holiday. It is an iron law of prime ministerial holidays that, no sooner has our great leader been photographed sunning himself in some foreign clime than there will be an outbreak of flooding and pestilence back home, terrorists will detonate a bomb or a vital part of the British economy will be faced with collapse.

Equally predictable is the likelihood that the opposition, egged on by loathsome tabloids, will be all over the airwaves alleging government indifference to the suffering of the citizens and demanding the recall of parliament. The impending meltdown of the steel industry is only the latest in a long series of such PR disasters.

Some crises are avoidable, of course. It was probably not very clever of Cameron to nip off to the Canary islands so soon after exhorting his fellow Britons to holiday in the Lake District. And as for Sajid Javid, perhaps he should have foreseen that the steel crisis was likely to come to a head during his proposed trip to Australia – the meeting of the Tata board in Mumbai was presumably flagged up some time in advance. No doubt he thought he was covered, leaving behind a competent junior minister – Anna Soubry – to take charge in his absence but, alas, such niceties cut no ice once a tabloid feeding frenzy is under way.

In Javid’s case the political miscalculation is compounded by the fact that he was clearly intending to mix business with pleasure – witness the discovery that he was accompanied by his teenage daughter. Javid’s other problem is that, as a hardline, free-market Thatcherite, there is, rightly or wrongly, a suspicion that he is not all that bothered about the collapse of the steel industry. After all, not many steelworkers vote Tory.

The holiday crisis is a relatively new phenomenon in British politics. It began with Tony Blair, who had a penchant for foreign holidays in exotic locations. In his case the problem was compounded by the fact that Blair family holidays almost always seemed to involve freeloading in luxurious villas in Tuscany or the Caribbean, borrowed from friendly multimillionaires.

Irritation at this was not confined to his political enemies. Alastair Campbell’s diaries contain several references to what he describes as “the usual holiday bollocks”. On one occasion, at new year, Blair and his family jetted off to the Seychelles, leaving Campbell in the winter gloom to cope with various domestic crises. Campbell placed a call to Blair who was out in a fishing boat. Halfway through the call Blair said: “Hold on. I think I’ve got a fish.” He handed the phone to his protection officer who proceeded to give a running commentary on the catch until Campbell, by now intensely irritated, said: “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the fish.”

Politicians’ holidays were never a problem in the good old days. Harold Wilson, who carefully cultivated his man-of-the-people image, never went farther than the Scilly Isles for his holiday, and it was taken for granted that the Tory elite would spend August on the grouse moors. Churchill could disappear to the south of France for weeks without anyone being so indelicate as to suggest he might be better employed managing the affairs of the nation.

In the foothills of government, which I once inhabited (happily in the days before the invention of Twitter and the smartphone), no one was much interested in my holiday arrangements. I was, however, almost caught out on one occasion when I was the designated duty minister at the Foreign Office during a long-arranged family holiday in the Orkneys, a place where mobile phone signals were erratic. Fortunately, I had a sympathetic private secretary who covered for me and the day passed uneventfully. Nowadays, a minister can’t be too careful.

It is a sad fact of political life, for which our politicians have mainly themselves to blame, that the great British public are only too ready to believe the worst of its elected representatives. The idea is deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that, whenever parliament is not sitting, MPs must be on holiday. I lost count of the number of occasions, coming down the steps of my office on a summer evening, when a passing constituent would slap me on the back and remark jocularly: “It’s all right for you, with your three-month holidays.”

“Where do you think I’ve been all day?” I would reply indignantly, pointing back at the office.

“Oh, I didn’t mean …” But, of course, he did.