Where, oh where, is Tony Blair? On his summer holiday – but where?

The British media knows where is is, but they aren’t telling because Scotland Yard and the PM’s chief spin doctor requested the media not reveal the details of the Blair family’s holiday arrangements for security reasons.

But while they’re not telling directly, Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn gave it away with this story yesterday:

“I did hear a rumour that the Blairs’ host is a confirmed bachelor boy. And judging by the photos … it’s a wonderful life – wherever they’re staying. Good times are clearly being had by all … Hurry home, Tony, wherever you are. These miss you nights are the longest. Try not to fall off a cliff.”

And The Daily Mail and The Sun have both run paparazzi pictures of holidaying PM on a yacht – with The Sun locating him somewhere in “the Caribbean Sea,” but with no more location details

“Hasn’t the rest of the press been rather too docile?” says The Independent‘s media columnist Stephen Glover. “At the very least there should have been a debate about the rights and wrongs of not revealing the Prime Minister’s whereabouts.”

Over at The Times, Alice Miles points out that the world always knows where President Bush is on vacation. “No 10’s jitters about Mr Blair’s whereabouts are all to do with how it looks that he is sunning himself while we sweat through the threat in London, and hardly anything to do with his security.”

And not knowing where the Blairs are means being deprived of “one of the chief joys of the great British summer,” writes Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian, Cadwalladr wants to know where the famously frugal family went, who paid, and whether they flew scheduled or went budget with “easyRAF” again.