British prime ministers on holiday - in pictures

With Brexit negotiations still in deadlock, the British PM can’t even go on holiday without attracting some form of criticism.

Snaps of Theresa May and her husband, Philip, strolling around Italy’s Lake Garda were described as “even more boring than the mutual recognition of goods standards post-Brexit” by the Daily Mirror’s political reporter Dan Bloom.

The photos of the couple in Desenzano del Garda are “more anodyne” than the walk she took last year, in exactly the same town, says Bloom.

“Not wanting to disappoint her fans, this time the PM threw in a couple of hand gestures,” he adds. 

A previous photograph of the PM on holiday in Switzerland in 2016 was described by the Mirror as “one of the most tedious images in political history”. 

Images of her predecessor David Cameron on holiday were certainly more entertaining, but often because of the efforts to make the stage-managed shots look as natural as possible.

Here, he and Samantha Cameron sit at a cafe in Montevarchi near Siena, Italy, in 2011. 

And here, they casually point at fish at a market in Aljezur, Portugal, in 2013. 

Photographs of prime ministers on holiday are something of a British tradition. Below, Tony Blair holds his son Leo after mass at a church in Venerque, France. Blair, his wife Cherie and their family were on a trip in nearby Le Vernet in 2002. 

May has been likened to Margaret Thatcher for their shared love of Switzerland. The former Tory prime minister is pictured below skiing near Zurich in 1962. But she apparently found holidays tiresome to organise and said they got in the way of her work.

“For Margaret Thatcher, it seems, downtime was not an option,” says the Financial Times. Her few holidays were always packed with appointments and meetings. 

On the other hand, Harold Wilson – the first PM to show his knees – used his holiday snaps to “reinforce the idea of himself as the first demotic prime minister,” says The Guardian, “happy to show himself off to photographers in shorts and sandals, eating ice cream, strolling on the beach, holding alfresco press conferences in the sand dunes”.