Attacks on Macron's jet-skiing holiday are utterly absurd

Certainties of the French summer are many and varied, ranging from vast traffic jams blocking the north-to-south motorways to “closed for annual leave” signs in the windows of all the best bakeries and butchers.

Numerous restaurants in major cities and towns will also be closed, while seats on high-speed trains will have been booked up months in advance.

Another ritual of the season involves the chef d’Etat – France’s head of state – showing off in his swimming trunks by a shimmering Mediterranean.

The paparazzi are allowed to capture him in all his manliness (there has never been a female president), before the images are splashed on the front cover of the mass market Paris Match magazine, and then syndicated around the world.

There will also be shots of a pouting and similarly underdressed First Lady. Usually, the première dame is looking longingly at her husband, as she wonders which intimate beachside bistro he will be taking her and his 15 security guards to when the sun sets.

Beyond showing that the Elysée Palace incumbent is fit and healthy, the idea of the pictures is to prove he is a normal guy who, like every other French citizen, deserves a bit of downtime in the most popular tourist destination in the world.

Summer holiday sparks backlash

The consensus around the annual snaps was shattered this summer, however, when pictures of Emmanuel Macron playing in the waves like an excited schoolboy were widely pilloried, in a manner that was as petty as it was ridiculous.

Everything about him was mocked – from the jet ski he was riding, to the fact that his septuagenarian wife looked like his concerned mum as she watched from the shore, wearing an age-inappropriate baseball cap.

Leftist politicians were particularly angry that the couple were lounging about the presidential retreat at Fort de Brégançon, on the Riviera, at a time when large parts of their country were still being ravaged by wildfires.

“Macron jetskis while France burns,” was the obvious and much-repeated headline, as Mr Macron was made to sound like an aquatic Nero, the Roman Emperor who – popular legend has it – fiddled during the Great Fire of AD 64.

Mr Macron’s most outspoken critic was the communist senator Pierre Ouzoulias, who said: “Personally, I would’ve preferred to see him in a fire truck, helping firefighters put out the blaze. That’s where he belonged.”

Such a view is utterly absurd. Firefighters are highly trained professionals who spent years learning how to put out infernos.

Suggesting that Mr Macron’s place was out in burning woods is like arguing he should have spent his summer personally policing high-crime areas, or organising charity whip-rounds for the poor and homeless.

President entitled to a summer break

Whatever you think about Mr Macron personally, or indeed his record as a politician, he remains one of the most powerful executives in the world, and is as entitled to the perks of office as anyone else elected to the job.

He is not a ubiquitous superman fixer who can be everywhere at once, but someone who is expected to fit into a historic role, and abide by the conventions surrounding it.

Mr Macron has stated, in fact, that he held up his break in Brégançon this summer until the worst of the horrendous fires in the south-west were out.

Yes, his high-profile holiday could have been less ostentatious – using a petrol-powered jet ski as greenhouse emissions heated the globe and contributed to at least five French heatwaves was poor – but it was entirely what was expected of him.