You're all in this together

[SueEllen]

Doesn't make any difference. A good percentage of the population is holidaying abroad.

If he's spending his own money thats fine.

Blair and Brown were keen on holidays when the bastards were wrecking the UK economy.

The Blairs were good at getting free accommodation from their famous "friends".

Least Osborne is spending his own money even if he does use the tax laws to his full advantage.

[centurian]

If a poor person has to contribute £1 to the deficit and a rich person has to contribute £500K, these people still say it's unfair because according to whatever formula they can dream up, the rich person is contributing less as a percentage of <whatever>

There's a fair chunk of the populace that won't think it's "fair" until they see everyone who is deemed to be "well off" being dragged from their homes, stripped of all their assets and being forced to beg on the streets.

Since you can't please these people no matter what you do - you may as well ignore them. All this parade in recent years of politicians (on all sides) taking holidays in the UK was just a facade. Better to have to honesty and say they're going to blind drunk in some foreign resort for a week.

[centurian]

The Blairs were good at getting free accommodation from their famous "friends".

In fairness to Blair (this hurts) their hosts (usually Egypt) often wouldn't accept payment. I think the arrangement was the hosts would calculate the cost of a "standard family" holiday, the blairs would pay it to the foriegn embassy, who would then immediately donate the money to a british charity.

The host government would then cover all additional costs - on the basis that it was due to his position as a visiting head of government, rather than a normal holidaymaker (i.e. helicopter from airport, bigger villa out of the way for security reasons etc.)

[hyperD]

Nice touches Osborne

At least Cameron had the sense to pull his planned New Year holiday to Thailand or wherever it was.

I think you're missing the point - these are the political elite, ergo:

(a) they are all at it

(b) newspapers from all sides of the political spectrum profit from anything they do

(c) if you are still supporting the red, blue or orange team or have a political chip on your shoulder you clearly haven't grasped it yet and are wasting valuable hours of your life and risking high blood pressure

Happy New Year my fellow CUKer!

[NotAllThere]

Well I for one am glad he's supporting the Swiss economy. We've got to cope with a VAT increase as well. From 7.6% to 8%.