Published: August 12, 2010
This would reduce all but the best-off to eating coconuts for the week. But the Blairs will pay the full bill, while the taxpayer picks up the tab for the bodyguards and administration staff, known as the “garden girls”.There will be a few reminders of home on an island that was granted its independence under Labour’s last prime minister, James Callaghan. And Anthony Eden – frustrated at missing his Malta holiday because of the Suez crisis – would have recognised Mr Blair’s need to leave behind all that fuss about single parents and the disabled.The Prime Minister arrived on the main island of Mahe with wife, mother- in-law and three children, flying on to a smaller island, La Digue. It is said to be like the Channel Island of Sark with sunshine – no cars, only bikes and ox-carts.
There, he can sunbathe on Anse Source D’Argent, the most photographed beach in the world, on an island which was the setting for Goodbye Emmanuelle, the soft-porn movie. He can expect temperatures of 30C, but he would be wise to carry an umbrella – the Prime Minister has picked the rainiest season for his holiday.Discounted club-class air fares for the family party would come to more than pounds 13,000. So would Edward Heath, who won the Sydney to Hobart ocean yacht race in 1969, months before becoming prime minister. And Jim Callaghan generally preferred his Sussex farm.
But not Tony Blair, who yesterday landed en famille in the Seychelles, a Bounty bar paradise in the Indian Ocean.Churchill, who liked to holiday in the Aegean with Aristotle Onassis, and with Lord Beaverbrook in France, would have sympathised. In a corner, training manuals for a “custodial care vocational qualification” for prison officers laid out security rules. Element 2.1 dealt with “maintaining security during routine movement of prisoners within the establishment”, which is what officers were doing with Billy Wright when he was gunned down.Mr Ingram announced a new programme of regular and random searches in the prison together with a series of enquiries into the various incidents and the general running of the jail.
Asked whether the Government would accede to Unionist calls for resignations he retorted: “Absolutely no Resignations are not on the cards. In Northern Ireland local politicians can be long on comment but very short on solutions and answers.”. Tony Blair quietly slipped away from his little local difficulties over cuts in benefits yesterday, and took his family to soak up the sunshine in the Marxist paradise of the Seychelles. Jack O’Sullivan and Colin Brown investigate prime ministerial holiday precedents. An escorted walk through a series of gates and four turnstiles followed, leading to a training room.
It is studded with occasional 30ft high watch-towers, its high points festooned with wires, cameras and searchlights. The situation in many areas is tense.Back at the Maze, meanwhile, the minister’s own car was subjected to a thorough search by paratroopers who looked in the boot and opened a suitcase before letting him through.Media personnel who wished to question him were identified, searched and driven within the prison complex in a minibus with opaque windows. They were then delivered at a gate set in a perimeter wall which is 16ft high and which runs for two and a half miles. Hundreds of teenagers were inside at the disco, but the LVF opened fire on the doormen instead of attempting to enter it to carry out what in Northern Ireland is known as a “spray-job”.The doorman who died, Seamus Dillon, was a former republican prisoner who had served a lengthy sentence for two IRA killings. Nowhere is there such a concentration of dedicated paramilitaries and terrorists, and that does make a very unique situation.”Twenty miles away Wright’s associates were busy organising for his funeral today. That too will be a unique occasion in that he thought a lot about death, partly because he had survived a number of previous assassination attempts; and also, perhaps, because he had inflicted a fair amount of death himself.He left behind detailed instructions for his own funeral.