PM heads home after Scottish bolthole found
The Prime Minister’s choice of summer break was typical of him, writes Harry Mount
BORIS JOHNSON cut short his summer holiday after it was discovered he was staying at a remote Scottish cottage, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
The Prime Minister and Carrie Symonds, his fiancée, flew back to London with Wilfred, their baby son, on Thursday evening after becoming concerned for their safety, it is understood.
Earlier a newspaper photographer had taken pictures of Mr Johnson outside a cottage on the Applecross peninsula where the family had been staying.
It came after Mr Johnson resisted pressure to return to Downing Street to take control of the exams fiasco. A source suggested their discovery made it impossible for them to stay until the weekend as planned. The pictures also showed a bell tent in a field next to the cottage but it was packed away yesterday as the landowner accused Mr Johnson of camping and lighting a campfire without permission. A Downing Street spokesman refused to comment.
It is this old-fashioned austere childhood that explains his approach to clothes, cuisine and comfort
They sought him here; they sought him there. Was Boris in Tuscany? The Caribbean? Neither, it turned out. The Prime Minister, his girlfriend Carrie Symonds, baby Wilfred and dog Dilyn were enjoying a humble holiday in Applecross, on the western Scottish coast, overlooking the Isle of Skye, in a three-bedroom cottage with a little bell tent in the field next door.
The field, it turns out in classic, chaotic, Carry On Boris style, belonged to an irate farmer – who wasn’t happy with him pitching his tent and lighting a fire on his land. Now their cover has been blown, the family have fled back home three days early.
A characteristically unkempt Boris was photographed grimacing outside the hillside cottage, sporting a black beanie hat and a seersucker shirt.
The hat is a useful touch on the Scottish coast, whatever the weather. This is a record year for midges, the wee beasties that eat you alive.
The cottage costs £1,500 a week in peak season. That isn’t surprising in Covid-hit Britain, where foreign destinations are subject to sudden quarantine imposition, and seaside cottages are gold dust.
Still, this Scottish cottage is some departure from Boris’s Christmas getaway, when he stayed in a £40,000-a-week villa in Mustique.
The PM did not disclose to the press where he was staying for his holidays.
The showman journalist of yesteryear was never backwards in coming forwards. But since he took office, he has shown an uncharacteristic taste for privacy. The same shyness applies to his holidays.
Foolishly, in light of his curtailed holiday, Boris didn’t go for the public photocall previous prime ministers offered in exchange for privacy for the rest of their holidays. This was a mainstay of the David Cameron years, when he was photographed every year in Ibiza or Cornwall, having a snack in front of the cameras.
Do we have a right to know where our senior politicians take their holidays? As a journalist, Boris would accept we do, even if he’s in no hurry to tell us where he’s going. And it is true that the choice of destination does reveal a lot about our various leaders.
In his unflashy holiday, Boris was harking back to prime ministers of the old days. Harold Wilson always went with his family to his Scilly Isles bungalow. It was built for the Wilson family in 1959, and was used by his widow, Mary, until her death in 2018, aged 102. Last year, it went on the market for the first time, at £425,000.
Margaret Thatcher wasn’t really one for holidays – she loved work too much. In 1984, her summer holiday in Austria and Switzerland was crammed with meetings – from visiting a chipboard factory to dining with Fred Sinowitz, the Austrian chancellor.
Gordon Brown, too, was not a natural, fun-loving holidaymaker.
More recently, we were treated to the sight of Theresa May walking off her troubles on hiking holidays in Wales and Switzerland.
The king of the flash freebie summer holiday was Tony Blair. With wife Cherie and young family, he took full advantage of the fabulous Tuscan estate of Prince Girolamo Strozzi.
As Boris himself wrote in The Telegraph: “The palazzo was where Tony Blair forged one of New Labour’s few hard-edged ideological positions: he was pro-sciutto and anti-pasto.”
In that same 2008 article, Boris said it was completely fine that prime ministers should stuff Skegness and take their trunks in search of southern sun. It fits with his libertarian instincts that no one should be forced to holiday anywhere they don’t want to.
The classicist Boris is particularly keen on holidays in Greece. His father Stanley has just got into hot water for visiting his villa in Greece during lockdown, in order to “Covid-proof ” the property for holiday lettings.
To be fair to Boris, he is completely used to the discomfort of the British countryside. He spent childhood summers on Exmoor, on the family farm bought by Stanley‘s father.
The farm stars in a new book about austere holidays, British Summer Time Begins – the School Summer Holidays 1930-1980, Maxtone Graham.
Rachel Johnson, Boris’s sister, showed the author a photograph of the family in the farmyard in 1970. Maxtone Graham writes: “They all look happy, but the children look quite grubby, with muddy knees and unwashed, unbrushed hair, clearly wearing any old rugged, stained item they’d found on the floor and managed to pull on. It was all gumboots, dirty gym shoes or bare feet on the scrubby ground.“
Rachel Johnson said of the holidays on Exmoor: “‘Neglect’ doesn’t do it justice. We were hungry all the time. We eat stale digestives that have been put into the Aga. It didn’t make them fresh. It just made them taste burnt.” Another recipe was ice cream made by “mixing Carnation milk with cocoa powder and putting the mixture into a pewter-coloured ice tray… it was basically milky ice with jagged shards”.
It is this old-fashioned, austere childhood that explains Boris’s approach to clothes, cuisine and comfort – he is indifferent to all three. Yes, he went to Eton and Oxford and was in the plutocratic Bullingdon Club (as I was too), but he was never a rich kid on pampered holidays.
He would have been completely at home in the rugged beauty of the Scottish coast. He would even have taken pleasure in any vigorous gales sweeping through Britain in the aftermath of Storm Ellen.
Twenty-four years Boris’s junior, Carrie was brought up in an entirely different Britain, a world of duvets, air con, central heating and cheap flights to exotic locations. Social media photos show her in a bikini, piloting speed boats through tropical waters.
She won’t have found much use for a bikini on the Scottish coast – although, if she wrapped it around her head, it might just have kept the midges off her ears.