Why Gordon Brown's British holiday plans cast a dark cloud

over Westminster 1 f anybody actually welcomed the eventual death of British motor-car manufacturing last year, you can bet it was government ministers. For 30 years, theirs had been a lumpen unhappy world of Rovers and Vauxhalls, while every other executive in Britain threw patriotism to the wind and enjoyed BMWs, Audis and Saabs, with a little Toyota for the good lady wife.

Think of this. Now imagine, if you can, the eyebrows raised in horror around Westminster when it emerged that Gordon Brown would be holidaying, this year, in the UK. Picture pens poised above catalogues of Tuscan villas, modest French chateaus or pretty little New England farmhouses of clapboard white. Imagine the faces of poor Mrs Darling, or tired Mrs Straw. 'Oh!' they must have wailed. 'This would never have happened under Miliband! Dorset? Fife? That bloody man!'

I don't know Dorset, but Fife is a fine place. On any one of its three annual days of sun, the beaches are divine. Indeed, if we are limiting ourselves to locations under an hour from Edinburgh where not owning golf clubs is considered a sure sign of latent transvestitism, then Fife must be one of my favourite places on this earth.

Paradise or not, New Labour holidayed abroad. Old Labour did not. New Labour acknowledged that abroad was nice, that you could go there and still be a socialist, and that nobody wanted to spend three weeks in August in a caravan in Skegness any more, except, perhaps, Margaret Beckett. It was a bold, confident step, and at a stroke it has been reversed. When foot-and-mouth broke out, and Gordon came home, David Cameron probably expected some credit for postponing his break to Brittany. In fact, brutally, he looked a bit flash for ever having planned one.

Call me naive, but I doubt this was planned. There were several reasons for the Browns to stay home this year. For one thing, I doubt our new Lord Protector is really much of a fan of holidays. He probably doesn't understand them; doesn't see why they are an ordeal he is expected to endure, let alone six weeks into a job he has craved for a decade and a half.

For another, when the Browns do reluctantly roll up their towels, they usually prefer to head to Cape Cod. Here, they meet with America's Democrat elite. This year both Ted Kennedy and John Kerry were reported to have offered loans of their holiday homes. Imagine Gordon explaining that, after the gurning awkwardness of Camp David. 'Lift to the airport?' says George Bush, tooting 'Dixie' from the horn of his golf buggy. 'Eh. Ah. No. . . '

Whatever the reason, it has happened now. Two days in Dorset, and the world has changed. Never glad Caribbean morning again. Tomorrow's political holidays must be as yesterday's political cars. Dull, British and resented.

And the rest of us smirk, and it is a shame. I am told that domestic UK tourism has been booming since 9/11, and is only falling this year due to our dreechit summer. Still, the British psyche struggles to accept that a holiday is really worthy of the name unless it is spent abroad. In the Guardian last month the Francophile writer Stephen Clarke remarked that cutting the French working week would mean that Frenchmen travelled on French transport to spend French money in France. 'If you cut an Englishman's working week to 35 hours,' he said, 'he would spend the additional free time flying to Bulgaria on an Irish jet.'

There must be many reasons for this, and paramount among them may be our unpredictable weather, or the fact that a weekend train fare to Exeter, these days, tends to cost slightly more than three weeks in a villa outside Marrakech. As a result, the average student probably knows the Himalayas better than he does the Lake District. Britain has always looked out. Have we forgotten how to look in?

I write this now (slightly smugly, although braced for accusations of hypocrisy) under a window which looks out over Lake Constance, in Germany. I'm here with Germans, and the neighbours are German. Out there, of the many boats playing strictly regulated chicken on the lake, most are German. This is where Germans come on holiday. I'm struggling to think of an equivalent back home.

Germanness, of course, is a simple matter, and tied to Germany. The German sense of nationhood emerges from an affinity between people and geography (which these days, happily, appears to stop at the border). If we wish to make Britishness a less hazy notion, perhaps we should attempt something similar. Forget tolerance, or fair play, or any of that abstract universal nonsense Think about Britain, from Dorset to Fife, and beyond.

Lurking down here, then, we find my tardy point. If politicians of all stripes are to follow Gordon's lead, holidaying henceforth at home, perhaps they could consider this an informative experience. They needn't do it with the gracelessness with which they once owned an Austin Allegro.

LWe stole countries,' says Eddie Izzard in his wonderful routine about colonialism, 'with the cunning use of flags.' I thought of this when I heard that the Russians had claimed the North Pole, by jettisoning a flag from a submarine under the ice cap.

Izzard pictures some haughty chap in a pith helmet, sailing around the world, planting a flag and claiming India for Britain. 'But we live here,' says a bemused Indian, `there's five hundred million of us.' Do you have a flag?' asks the explorer, waggling his eyebrows. 'No flag, no country.'

Russia, I now discover, has form for this sort of thing. I had always assumed that the only flags on the Moon were American ones, planted by Neil Armstrong et al, from 1969 onwards. Not so. Apparently the place is littered with Soviet insignia, scattered by drones up to a decade earlier.

Improbable as it may sound, the USSR's Luna 2, which orbited the satellite in 1959, actually carried three large pennant bombs. Two of these were large spheres, with a surface of pentagonal stainless steel flags around an explosive charge. The third was a liquid bomb, filled with Soviet-branded aluminium strips. All three were designed to explode on impact, showering their little symbols of ownership far and wide across the lunar terrain.

Isn't that the maddest thing you ever heard? It must look like the teenage Ben Elton's bedroom up there.