The Granada tourist board is upset that nobody bothered to tell them that David & Sam Cameron were coming for a short break over the weekend.
“Had we known” said a tourist board flunky, “we could have used the opportunity in a quiet way to promote Granada…. nobody from the Junta or the Governor’s Office bothered to tell us, and we are not psychic”.
Well, quite. The National Police (who sent quite a few bodyguards to make sure nobody bothered the couple) said that the “comfort and security” of the couple was uppermost in the mind, leaving unsaid that if they had told Granada, and Granada had called for a day’s holiday in honour of the couple as they stepped off their Ryanair flight, it would have spoilt the point.
I trust, therefore, that the Granada tourist laddie lamenting the lost opportunity did not read Janice Turner in today’s Sunday Times:
“You have to wonder how David broke the news to Samantha. “Darling, I’ve booked a little surprise trip for your 40th. No, not Nat’s yacht. We’re going Ryanair. I’ve heard they’re terribly good. No, I didn’t get priority boarding. Steve thinks paying to jump the queue might not send out quite the right message just now.”
He swapped her luxury Thai Christmas break for chilly Chequers walks, and her Cornish staycation was spent squeezing out baby Flo. You have to feel for Sam Cam. Even her big birthday must effortfully transmit the Government’s austerity vibe. People’s airline; southern Spain (not drugs’n’ fun Ibiza); “mid-range” hotel (when did the Cams last slum it in threestar?); worrying that your Smythson Brunhilde is too big for hand luggage and will get shoved in the hold; having to do that fast trot across the tarmac to make sure you’re not aisles apart.”
Yup – the PM is “slumming it” in Granada, according to Janice, in order to make everyone else back in Blighty feel better about the austerity cuts. Ah well. I’m sure they still had fun.
On a side note, El Mundo reports that the couple booked seven rooms in the hotel. Their own, plus six more for “staff”. David Cameron spoke Castellano to the waiters at the restaurant where the couple ate (cribs from Cleggers?) and a nearby gardener refused point blank to believe that the nice English couple was actually the Prime Minister. In the newspaper article I read, the gardener, asked by the journalist, admitted that he may have been a minister, but hardly the Prime Minister.
“Presidentes” he told El Mundo firmly, “do not stay in three star hotels with just a couple of assistants.”