The image that may best distil the vulgar side of Tony Blair shows him grinning beside Silvio Berlusconi in 2004. The then Italian prime minister had invited Blair to his 68-room Sardinian bunga-bunga palace, which features a manmade volcano and is reportedly being sold to Saudi Arabia’s royal family for £350m.
Berlusconi held a summer party at which a fireworks display scribbled “Viva Tony!” in the night sky; the Blairs “clapped enthusiastically” at the sight. Cherie Booth, a leading human rights lawyer, later said it was her best-ever holiday. In subsequent years, further summer photographs emerged of TB strumming his guitar at Cliff Richard’s Barbadian villa: all utterly Blair.
The holiday snaps of semi-naked world leaders betray the true identities of the politicians. Invariably they amplify what we had already suspected: Angela Merkel hiking Teutonically through Italy; Obama and family promenading photogenically in the Hawaiian surf; Nicolas Sarkozy on Cap Nègre, stretched and de-lovehandled by photo-editing software: you could have predicted all of them.
Once a year, from behind the trust-me summit suits and shirts, emerge the wobbling moobs, outy belly buttons and weirdly shaped nipples of the political elite. And then there is Vladimir Putin, who has turned his holiday snaps into a uniquely smug and homoerotic version of the round-robin Christmas letter.
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This year Dr Evil boarded a bathyscaph to examine an ancient shipwreck in the Black Sea off the recently annexed Crimea. His previous photo ops have included tranquillising a siberian or amur tiger in a nature reserve (“borrowed” from a zoo hundreds of miles away and later said to have died in the ordeal), piloting a hang-glider to encourage cranes to fly south, extinguishing wildfires and, most memorably, riding a horse while shirtless.
“The terrible thing is that Putin does all this physical stuff, but when he stands next to the other world leaders he looks like a shrimp,” says the commentator Peter York.
“Cameron might seem a bit silly or podgy on the beach, but he doesn’t take anything like the same level of risk.”
Ah, yes. This year our prime minister couldn’t munch a small cylinder of easyJet paprika Pringles without being filmed by a fellow passenger, Ashleigh, 16. (“I found the experience humbling,” she revealed.) Like most Conservatives, the chillaxer-in-chief often does well from holiday photos: both the staged “Dos cervezas, por favor” ones and the less forgiving telephoto shots.
Two years ago Cameron even managed to change publicly into his swimming trunks by using a deft towel-as-makeshift-beach-hut manoeuvre and looking relatively patrician throughout.
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“Semi-upper-class people like him have quite a bit of confidence about that sort of thing,” claims York.
Labour leaders, however, often struggle. Gordon “Arctic Monkeys” Brown was simply lost during the parliamentary recess. When photographers arrived to record the then prime minister’s Suffolk “holiday” of 2008, they found that his solitary concession to leisure had been to swap his dark jacket for a beige one. And Neil Kinnock couldn’t walk along a beach without falling into the sea.
Sodden with questions of class and personality, leaders’ holiday pictures can easily destroy them. And it is politically fraught: when The Sun ran its notorious “Bumdestag” headline beside a swimming-pool shot of Merkel, it prompted a minor diplomatic row. These pictures are supremely difficult to spin, which is why American politicians — typically more comfortable in their evenly bronzed skin — are better at these photo ops than British ones.
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George W Bush, for example, hauling cedarwood at his Texas ranch, Hillary Clinton papped while reading a book on a Caribbean beach, Obama fist-bumping on the golf course — each exudes a certain stylish continuity. The unspoken holiday photo ambition of all American legislators is to exude the easy glamour of JFK on a yacht with Jackie.
This year we saw a late entry from Ed Miliband, who emerged for a selfie at Brisbane airport sporting a Jeremy Corbyn-esque “milibeard”. This should be removed at once: the last thing voters want to see in a politician’s summer photo is any hair in the wrong places.