THE comparisons between the Blair family's freebie holiday in Italy and that in the Mediterranean of the Prince of Wales, his "friend" Camilla Parker Bowles, his sons and his 20 other guests, who, like him, are in turn all guests on the yacht of some celebrity-collecting ex-docker Greek tycoon, are hardly valid.

For, unlike the Prime Minister, the royals are born to a life of freeloading. The difference is that Tony Blair has taken to it.

I do not deny that he works hard and deserves a holiday.

But don't we all?

Yet it is evident that, following the criticism about him and his family being put up rent-free in a former presidential villa in Tuscany refurbished at a £380,000 cost to Italian taxpayers, initially having five miles of local beach closed to all but them and a local restaurant shutting its doors to the public so its two chefs can cater exclusively for them, the Blairs, in contrast, to Charles and his gaggle of groupies, feel at least some embarrassment over the privileges they have been afforded. After all, following the fuss, Mr Blair has reacted by getting the private beach he and his family may enjoy reduced to "just" 300 yards, by donating an unspecified sum to a local charity in lieu of his waived rent and has forked out some £600 a seat - roughly the equivalent of British Airways' Club Class prices - for the use of an RAF jet to fly him and his family to and from Pisa.

Yet, even in spite of these gestures and even in contrast with the characteristically systematic scrounging of the royal set, should Mr Blair, as a democrat, not know better than to freeload like this?

After all, he and his immensely well-paid wife can afford to holiday at their own expense and, even with the security considerations that come with his position, could do so if they wished. The real contrast in this instance is not between the Blairs and Charles and Co living like lords in order to convince a humbly-born groupie Greek billionaire that he's up there with the nobs, but with the German Chancellor, Gerhard SchrM- der, currently holidaying with his wife and daughter a few hundred miles down the Italian coast in a small family hotel on a budget of £90 a day - much like the voters he hopes to impress.

Why could not the Blairs do likewise?

For no matter how many privileges others may have laid on for them, the difference is that, even with the embarrassed watering-down of them, they have still taken them up, have they not?

The opinions expressed by John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper.

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