The smart choice for summer: staycations

Gordon Brown: Business as usual

Gordon Brown was supposed to have started his holiday last week, but you wouldn't know it. The Prime Minister is meant to be taking it easy at his constituency home in the Fife village of North Queensferry. He said he planned to spend the time playing with his two children and watching recorded highlights of this summer's sporting events.

On his first "day off", however, he marked the end of Operation Panther's Claw in Afghanistan in a string of television interviews. These were followed by a statement on the plight of Peter Moore, the British hostage in Iraq, congratulations to the organisers of the successful bid to bring the 2015 Rugby World Cup to England and a tribute to the late football manager Bobby Robson.

Downing Street has insisted that Mr Brown remains in overall charge of the Government wherever he is and will continue to be briefed on key issues such as swine flu, the economy and Afghanistan.

He was not always confined to the delights of the UK for his holidays. Before his children arrived, Mr Brown was a devotee of Cape Cod, not far from President Obama's preferred destination of Martha's Vineyard. Mr Brown used his time in the sun to study political and economic tomes.

The furthest he is expected to venture from home this year, though, will be to the Lake District to bang the drum for British holidays. Even then his visit to Cumbria is only likely to last a few days.

David Cameron, meanwhile, has encouraged senior Conservative colleagues to take a proper holiday to "recharge their batteries". They might not get the same chance in 2010 as the Tories hope to be running the country this time next year after a general election victory.

Mr Cameron eschewed domestic alternatives and at the weekend flew off to Brittany with his family for a fortnight. He is due to return in mid-August for constituency meetings and public appearances before going to Greece for a second break.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg is taking his usual summer break in Castile and León. His wife, Miriam, was brought up in the province in central Spain and each year the couple take their children to stay with his in-laws. Once the blistering sun is low in the sky, Mr Clegg likes to cycle through the parched countryside surrounding the house.

Nigel Morris

Berlusconi: Whipped into shape

Most people in high profile, high pressure jobs like to let their hair down a little come holiday season.

But after all the partying with young starlets and call girls, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, inset, probably feels he has done all that. This year, to the relief of his frazzled PR people, he has opted for a more ascetic summer break.

Of course, with 18 properties, staying at home isn't quite so boring for Mr Berlusconi as it is for the rest of us. The libidinous media mogul is retreating to his villa in Arcore, right, outside Milan, and is relying on a disciplinarian Austrian lady to whip him into shape. During their 10-day stay in Arcore, Frau Gertraud Mitterrutzner von Guggenberg and her team, from a private clinic in the mountains of South Tyrol, will subject the 72-year-old Mr Berlusconi to a strict daily routine of muesli and sit-ups. The official line: the stay will "allow him to slim down and reactivate his metabolism".

The notoriously vain Prime Minister is concerned about the extra pounds he's put on as a result of steroid injections needed for his neck pain. "I'm doing 10 days of sporting therapy, because with the cortisone that I've taken I need to burn off a bit of weight," he told reporters. The Von Guggenberg clinic, which espouses a strict diet and hydrotherapy, has proved a favourite of Italian celebrities past and present, from fashion designer Ottavio Missoni to actor and "Dolce Vita" star, Marcello Mastroianni. After the lurid headlines of recent months, Mr Berlsuconi will hope the treatments reinvigorate him for the fray.

But there will be extra pressure on Frau Mitterrutzner von Guggenberg to work miracles in the purification department now the Prime Minister has decided to shelve his pilgrimage to the shrine of Padre Pio. The trip was cancelled when it became obvious such a PR stunt was more likely to incite Catholic anger than appease it.

For the rest of August, the resilient, but politically wounded, Prime Minister will spend time with his grandchildren in Arcore, no doubt praying the ladies in his life don't produce more nasty surprises.

Michael Day

Nicolas Sarkozy: Ready to relax

If Nicolas Sarkozy ever needed a little rest and relaxation, now is surely the time. The French President, a renowned workaholic who keeps a punishing schedule, finally felt it catch up with him last week when he collapsed during an early morning jog.

Despite his protestations that at 54 years old he is still as fit as a fiddle, he has cancelled trips to Australia and Canada. And now he has started a holiday that would make most middle-aged men's hearts a little lighter: three weeks in Saint-Tropez with Carla Bruni.

Unusually in France for someone of his stature, Sarkozy has never owned a second home, preferring hotels and private yachts. But his wife has persuaded him to spurn overseas breaks and join her at Château Faraghi, the singer's secluded family property at Cap Nègre, along with an assortment of their children. While Mr Sarkozy will keep in touch with Paris, early photos of the two swimming in the Mediterranean suggest that he intends to take it easy.

He will hope that the break doesn't suffer from the interruptions that plagued his break in Le Lavandou last year, when he was forced to go to Moscow to broker talks between Russia and Georgia over the South Ossetia war, and got drawn into a local battle over sewage in the seawater. This time, it seems likely that politics – whether local or international – will take a back seat.

Archie Bland

Vladimir Putin: Submarines and satellites

It wouldn't be summer without the world's most testosterone-fuelled politician making a macho gesture, and, sure enough, with August upon us, the Russian Prime Minister is at it again. This time, to follow on from such previous greatest hits as topless fishing, fighter-jet flying and tiger-shooting, 56-year-old Vladimir Putin has celebrated the start of his holiday by taking a submarine to the bottom of the deepest lake on the planet.

It seemed like a logical next step for Mr Putin, who had spent the previous day attaching a satellite transmitter to a Beluga whale. But the 1,400 metre, four-and-a-half-hour descent into Lake Baikal, in deepest Siberia, had a purer motive than mere posturing, the Prime Minister insisted. The idea was to inspect the natural gas crystals, as yet untouched, that lie under the water. The sight was "very clean and beautiful", he said.

With his heroic duties out of the way, Mr Putin can now relax – a bit – in the traditional seat of Russian power in August, Sochi. The Black Sea resort has been a popular retreat for Moscow's elite for years, which means the usual designation of "holiday home" doesn't quite fit: Mr Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev may be away from the Kremlin, but their duties will not let up.

Even if Mr Medvedev manages to clear his in-box, he will still have to work hard to keep his predecessor from stealing his thunder: while Mr Putin has ceded the long-standing presidential destination of Bocharov Stream, his presence in town – and potential for shirt-removal – is bound to keep the media interested. Not, he claims, that he has any more heroic holiday feats in mind. What next, he was asked – a trip to space? Mr Putin gravely declined. "There's enough work on Earth," he said.

Archie Bland

Barack Obama: Top-dollar digs

The Senate will pack up at the end of this week, and most members of the House of Representatives have already left sultry Washington. Barack Obama, however, is waiting until the end of the month before taking a proper holiday with his wife, two daughters and Bo, the dog. Even that will be seen as an indulgence in times of near-double-digit unemployment and foreign wars by critics who will also question his choice of destination. In a country where many people have never gone abroad and where such a range of domestic destinations are available, the decision to take a break at home doesn't have quite the same PR impact as it might do elsewhere.

That is particularly true when the destination is Martha's Vineyard, the tranquil surf-'n'-lobster island off the coast of Massachusetts favoured by the East Coast elite as well as by Democratic Party royalty such as the Kennedy and Clinton clans.

Still, let's agree, Mr Obama hardly has a reputation for slacking. His non-stop schedule contrasts with his predecessor, George Bush, who became famous for taking protracted summer breaks hacking at dusty brush on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The President's holiday will only last for a week. And he is unlikely to apologise for that.

"Do I think every single day about the hardships that the American people are going through? Absolutely," he told CBS television recently. "Do I think the American people think that because of those hardships, I shouldn't spend a little bit of time with my daughters? I don't think that's how the American people think about it."

Inevitably, the house chosen for the family getaway errs distinctly towards the posh. The Vineyard Gazette reveals that the First Family's digs will be a farm on the west end of the island that normally rents for $35,000 to $50,000 per week and boasts four different dwellings (plenty of space for the White House entourage), a private dock, an orchard and a film-screening room.

It doesn't help that the Blue Heron Farm is in Chilmark, designated America's most expensive small town by BusinessWeek magazine in 2007. Scouts for the family did look at several other spots on the island but all were rejected, largely because they were in areas where the President's presence would have been too disruptive. How he handles the financial crisis is important, of course. But the voters would never forgive a presidential traffic jam.

David Usborne

And the rest...

Gordon Brown is not alone in eschewing the glamour of a villa retreat in favour of a lower key sort of holiday. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, pictured right, for instance, started her holiday with a trip to the Bayreuth opera festival. Despite an impending election – she will have noted with satisfaction the travails of opposition front-bencher Ulla Schmidt, whose official limo was stolen after she took it on holiday with her to Spain – she and her husband plan to spend the rest of the week hiking in northern Italy. That's the sort of break that even high patriotism couldn't persuade Mr Berlusconi to take. Elsewhere in Europe, Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt will be at home – a few days off, his spokeswoman said, but "you couldn't really describe it as a holiday" – thanks to his country's EU presidency. And although Spanish PM Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has started a sojourn on Lanzarote, it has been interrupted by a visit to victims of a forest fire in the neighbouring island of La Palma.