The prime minister was criticised over the weekend for his holiday break in Spain, during which he was pictured looking morose at a Ryanair gate (the default expression for anyone experiencing Ryanair's tough-love version of service) and visiting a cashpoint. The gripe seemed to be that the Camerons, despite being rich, were deliberately under-enjoying themselves in order to present a media-friendly picture of austerity. George Osborne, meanwhile, has been criticised for spending too much, the Blairs were vilified for accepting freebies and Gordon Brown was picked on for rarely taking holidays and not enjoying them when he did.
If you're a politician, it seems, you can't win. What sort of prime ministerial holiday would the media and the public actually approve of? The best you can say of the following suggestions is that none of them has been tried yet:
▶ Weekend North Sea canoeing holiday, where only the canoe comes back.
▶ Fashion week mini-break to Milan to represent the interests of British hair-shirt manufacturers.
▶ Two-week residential stint as a volunteer perpetrator at a police dog training school.
▶ Constituency-based staycation featuring painful self-reflection and a skin rash.
▶ All-cabinet, last-man-standing boxing weekend in Mexican desert.
▶ Three-week stay at Cliff Richard's luxury villa in Portugal, totally trashing the place in the process.
▶ Backpacking tour of American bible camps with Prince Andrew.
▶ All-expense paid fortnight's stay in Heathrow airport's Terminal 4.
▶ Annual Cornish seaside house arrest.
▶ The Guantánamo Experience.
▶ 127-hour US rock climbing holiday with arm trapped under boulder.
▶ One month summer house swap with the Kardashians.
▶ North Korean wine-tasting tour.
▶ Disappear into jungle until presumed dead. Suddenly resurface two years later with a small army of outlaws and enough gold, diamonds and cash to erase the national debt. Offer wealth to nation on a "no questions asked" basis.
▶ Pirate-hijacked luxury cruise.
