Word: holidays
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...choosing to vacation at home, Brown's in good company. His predecessor Tony Blair drew jeers from British newspapers for his lavish holidays abroad, but many British politicians are sticking closer to home this summer. Finance Minister Alistair Darling has chosen an island off Scotland's northwest coast for his vacation, while Conservative Party leader David Cameron has hit the beach in Cornwall, southwest England (though he is fitting in a second holiday in Turkey in a few weeks...
...have to face voters again for four years. "I say stuff Skegness," Johnson wrote in his column in The Daily Telegraph last week, scorning the seaside town in England's east. "I say bugger Bognor," he added, knocking another in the south. "I am going to take a holiday abroad, and in my view it would be absurd, hypocritical and frankly inhumane to do anything else...
...Johnson (half) jokes, but in defending his right to vacation abroad he also recognizes an unquestionable fact of modern politics: where a leader chooses to holiday is invariably loaded with meaning. It's the reason President Bill Clinton headed for the Wyoming mountains for a vacation in 1996 after his pollster told him his preferred spot, Martha's Vineyard, was seen by swing voters as too snooty. It explains why, in 2003, when an Italian tourism official likened Germans to "stereotyped blonds with hyper-nationalist pride ... who noisily invade our beaches", Germany's then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder nixed...
...austerity that Brown has used to mark a break with his flashier former boss and rival Blair, famous for his breaks in aging pop star Cliff Richard's Barbados house and Bee Gee Robin Gibb's Florida mansion. Britain is the "best place in the world to have a holiday," said Brown last summer. This from a man who was a regular visitor to Cape Cod until he became Prime Minister...
...Rodney Barker, head of the Government department at the London School of Economics. "But we also look at politicians and ask: 'are they our sort of person?'" And that, says Catherine Needham, a lecturer in politics at Queen Mary, part of the University of London, includes "looking at their holiday destinations...