What is it about world leaders on holiday? The US presidential election is still three months off and Barack Obama is vacationing in Hawaii, where he spent much of his childhood. But is the American media ready to leave him and his family alone to enjoy what you would have to say is a hard-earned break?

The short answer is, no. Americans are funny about holidays, which they see as a sign of weakness. Many business executives don’t take even the meagre number of days-off due to them for fear that they will return to find someone else sitting at their desk. Two weeks is as much as most people manage in a year; only those in powerful positions or who believe themselves to have cast-iron job security dare to disappear for a month. The rest just fret.

But Obama knows what lies ahead of him — a campaign as bitter and hard-fought as any since Kennedy versus Nixon. US voters ought, in my view, to be ashamed of their performance in recent years. In 2001, they voted, narrowly, in favour of Al Gore and against George W Bush, only for the Supreme Court to veto their decision. But then, in 2004, given the opportunity to replace Bush with the infinitely more suitable John Kerry, they opted to stick with the bumbler.

This time around, with the young, energetic and principled Obama as the Democratic candidate, you would imagine that change is inevitable. How could Obama not win? How could the electorate, after five years of a disastrous war followed by near economic collapse, even think of voting for John McCain, a 71-year-old warmonger with no known economic policy beyond drilling for oil along the American seashore?

Yet, if the polls are to be believed, millions of Americans are thinking of doing just that. They are concerned that Obama, with his ‘revolutionary’ talk of reforming the healthcare system, is a dangerous lefty. Lots of them — possibly a majority — would rather vote for more war and more debt than a withdrawal from Iraq and four years of economic reform. To this faction, the very fact that Obama has gone on vacation is proof of his lazy ‘foreign’ ways. He should be out on the stump, acting like Captain America, not lying on a beach half way to Japan.

McCain may wear $500 shoes, handmade in Italy; he may own six homes and be married to an heiress worth $200m. But he is perceived as the All-American candidate. I still think Obama will squeak home. I simply cannot believe that there are enough eejits out there to ensure a third Bush term. But it will be a close-run thing and anything could happen. Here in France, Nicolas Sarkozy and his third wife, the ex-model Carla Bruni, were photographed this week frolicking in Cap Negre, near the resort of San Tropez. The cameras followed them everywhere they went — though not, thus far, into the bedroom.

So, we were asked to believe that the diminutive head of state and his statuesque bride were behaving in an un-presidential way — this in spite of the fact that at least half the French population are now divided between the Med, the Vendée and Brittany.

When Sarko and la Première Dame first went on holiday after their marriage last November, the press scolded them for not getting on with the nation’s business.

Bruni was not best pleased: “We took three days and (the criticism) lasted weeks and weeks. It looked like we spent five weeks lying on the beach, and we spent two hours.”

Aaah, but as Spiderman’s uncle reminded the young superhero, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Sarko must have been so annoyed — and yet at the same time so excited — when Russia launched its assault on Georgia. This required him, as President of the European Council, to get suited up and launch himself at the conflict. Will he achieve anything? I doubt it. But he had to go. Otherwise, the French Press would have accused him and his wife of fiddling with each other as Tbilisi burned.

Which brings us to that lugubrious old codger Gordon Brown. When the Kirkaldy man took over from Tony Blair last summer, it was pointed out to him that he would do well not to emulate his predecessor by holidaying abroad in luxury villas loaned to him by various tycoons and overseas aristocrats.

Brown heeded the warning. Thus it was that he and his family headed off this summer to Southwold, in Suffolk, clutching their gaberdines.

Unlike Sarko, Browno does not appear anxious to swap his business suit for a pair of baggy swimming trunks. The Scot, I like to think, goes swimming in sports jacket and flannels. But he, too, has his critics. ‘It’s 2008, for God’s sake!

He’s not Stanley Baldwin. Has he no idea of the image he’s projecting?’ Like Al Gore in 2001, he just can’t win.