Perks of the job: Here's where world leaders holiday

Love Island it won’t be, but as an invitation it’s hard to beat: want to stay on my rock? No Prime Minister would turn a President down when it’s put like that, so tomorrow Theresa May will fly to France to join Emmanuel Macron at Brégançon Fort, the official presidential retreat.

In theory they will be there for talks about Brexit. In reality, the President is playing a not-so-subtle world-leader version of top trumps, scoring a bonus as the only head of state whose job comes with a private island, plus a cellar packed with premier cru claret.

There’s been a castle on the outcrop, just offshore in the blue Mediterranean near Toulon, for centuries. It was improved by Napoleon, rebuilt for a garrison in the First World War and then restored as a private house. General de Gaulle stayed the night in 1964: he must have liked it. Soon after it was taken over by the state as a private presidential villa and it’s been used, intermittently, ever since. David Cameron was the last British PM to stay there, after the death of his father while on holiday in France.

So what’s life like inside? There’s always a fascination with the summer secrets of world leaders safe behind the security cameras. Is it all suntan cream and sand, just like holidays for the rest of us, or a Bond-like world of secret lifts into cavernous spas, endless caviar and stylish encounters with chilled-out presidents in Vilebrequin shorts?

I’ve spent the afternoon on a sun lounger in Spain next to a former prime minister and jumped into Sydney Harbour after lunch in the garden of a future one, and I’d say that like all holidays, the people you are with matter much more than the location, however impressive. I once ended up with an invitation to the private country house of the Vice-President of Colombia, where the salt-crust beef was served on a bed of rose petals, and that was definitely memorable — but the next day we headed off in a beaten up old school minibus we’d borrowed, to drink rum in a local bar, and that was pretty good too.

Macron makes Brégançon look super-cool: but he’d be stylish even he never went further than Butlins. And while the island’s location is amazing, it’s still — underneath — a converted fort, with austere dark corridors, small windows and lots of steps. It’s been open for tours since 2014 when the President is away (“The interiors are sober, it is not Versailles,” says one online review). There are no public toilets and you can’t take photos.

But even so, a private presidential island in the Med — what a toy to have. Macron must love the bling, even if he might complain about the lack of a pool. He’s come under fire for having a new private one put in to avoid being photographed using a beach in full view of long-lens photographers — but then maybe that’s understandable when one of his predecessors, Jacques Chirac, was photographed naked leaning on a balustrade, binoculars raised to his eyes.

The snaps, which showed “the President in the most basic of all attires and displaying the principal organs of state”, according to France’s version of Private Eye, were never printed.

There’s surely no risk of Theresa May being caught out like that: she is serious about long walks not swimming (so trapping her on a small, steep island could be a sort of French joke). In return, perhaps she’ll invite Macron to stay at Chequers and take him on a route march through the Buckinghamshire mud. Cameron did that with Angela Merkel and had to help unpin her from a barbed-wire fence. Maybe that’s where Britain’s EU relations started to go wrong.

So when you are a world leader, what holiday house do you get with the job?

State of a nation

Holiday home: Camp David (official name Naval Support Facility Thurmont).

In use since: Franklin D Roosevelt converted it to a presidential retreat in 1942 (he called it Shangri-La).

Luxury rating: HHHHH

Spend your time: in peace, since President Trump seems to hate coming — he didn’t show up for Christmas and hangs out instead amid the glitz, golf and gold taps of his Florida property.