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Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, will fly to Spain next month.. But he is expected to head for the south of France, which has rapidly replaced Tuscany in the affections of New Labour.Last year, Mr Campbell, and his partner Fiona Millar, Cherie Blair’s press secretary, played host to the pollster Philip Gould and his wife, Gail Rebuck, in the Provencal town of Vaison-la-Romaine.From the other side of the House, Iain Duncan Smith, a keen fly-fisherman, is also joining the migration north of the border. John Prescott’s choice also remained a closely guarded state secret. The Deputy Prime Minister is traditionally unadventurous in his travels, often preferring the pleasures of the West Country to the perils of international resorts – a penchant that critics say colours his working itinerary.The Ministry of Defence also refused to say where Geoff Hoon would spend his summer. The Defence Secretary, at the centre of the furore over the death of the weapons expert David Kelly, was heavily criticised for taking his family on a skiing holiday as war with Iraq loomed.Also unwilling to reveal his holiday plans is Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s embattled director of communications and strategy. “He is going somewhere in Europe,” a spokesman said.The plans of Charles Clarke, the Secretary of State for Education, John Reid, the Secretary of State for Health, Baroness Amos, the Secretary of State for International Development, and Andrew Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, were not known. The Foreign Office was vague about the summer plans of Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, for whom exotic travel is part and parcel of the job.

He has not disclosed the honeymoon destination.Many cabinet ministers regard their holiday arrangements as private. Mr Hain married the businesswoman Elizabeth Haywood, a former Welsh Woman of the Year, last month, but could take only two days out of politics after the ceremony in his south Wales constituency. But his ministers seem more inclined to follow last year’s trend of taking at least part of their holidays in Britain when the Cabinet flew the flag for domestic tourism after the foot-and-mouth epidemic.Gordon Brown, whose wife Sarah is heavily pregnant, is abandoning his customary summer in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to stay in his native Scotland this summer.Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, famous for her love of camping, will take to her trusty caravan and head for France after a few days in her Derby constituency. Tony Blair may be flying to Barbados as the Westminster village decamps this summer but his less peripatetic cabinet colleagues are venturing no further than Scotland and the near-Continent.
The Blairs will enjoy a rock-star break at Sir Cliff Richard’s Caribbean holiday home overlooking the surf breaking on the white beaches of Barbados’s Platinum Coast. Yet they did, and without politics, the characters of this book and the dynamic of the Soviet system can only be accounted for in terms of the basest and cruellest of emotions let loose.But you don’t kill 20 million people just with base impulses.

They help, but you need a state and an ideology – you need politics That is a much harder comic prospect. In its absence, it is hard not to think that Dynamo’s performance lacks the emotional heart and intellectual steel that the story demands. A new edition of the reviewer’s ‘Football Yearbook’ (Dorling Kindersley) is published next week. From the perspective of the early 21st century, it is hard to see the politics and ideology, still harder to take it seriously; as if anyone ever believed the era’s Marxist-Leninist doublespeak. I just could not feel the cold, the humiliation, the fear and despair that an imagined Soviet Moscow must surely evoke.So what went wrong? Was it merely my half-time reminder of the personal realities of life under Communism? I think there is something else going on; or rather, not going on in Dynamo There is no politics. The language of the book suddenly felt very British and contemporary. The depth of the characters thinned, their emotional lives contrived for comic effect.