The National:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his family were forced to cut short their holiday in the Highlands after pictures were published in the media identifying its location.

This has led to speculation about who leaked the details of where the Johnsons were holidaying, and has even led some to question whether the PM should be holidaying at all, in view of the ongoing Covid crisis.

My view is that of course Boris and his family are entitled to a holiday. It’s just a pity they seem to have been on one scripted by Armando Iannucci.

The Scottish Highlands are an ideal holiday destination if you are into long walks, fantastic scenery and evenings by the hearth with a good whisky – as long as you remember to bring your hazmat suit for sundown. That is when the midges go into a frenzy, and they are particularly ferocious this year.

But it’s a surprising choice for someone more used to holidaying in the likes of Mustique. Call me a cynic, but I’m not entirely convinced that a bit of Highland hygge is really Boris’s thing. After all, as editor of The Spectator, he once published a poem calling for Hadrian’s Wall to be refortified.

READ MORE: Boris Johnson cuts short holiday in Scotland as location is revealed

It could be that Michael Gove – chair of the committee to save the Union – persuaded Boris a Scottish staycation would go down well with the natives. The sight of Highland Boris in a bobble hat might help persuade the Scots to stay, as it were. Perhaps Gove discussed it with his new friend, Mr Galloway.

Whatever the case, you have to feel sorry for whoever had to sleep in the much-photographed tent - and not only because I am advised by those who know about these things that it was set up on a downward slope, pretty much guaranteeing a soggy bottom.

And why would anyone in the SNP want to end the Johnson holiday? The idea of the PM sat in a damp field in a badly put-up tent being eaten alive by midges has a certain charm to it

Others suggest that the tent was not used for sleeping but as a dedicated space for Boris to go through his red boxes of official documents in privacy. This seems rather unlikely to me. Maybe they were just using it to watch old videos of Glastonbury.

While the exact purpose of the tent remains a mystery, it was unfortunately set up without asking permission of the landowner, who was also annoyed by the lighting of an open fire on his property.

While understandably unwilling to disclose the location, No10 was happy to brief the press on Boris’s holiday reading – On The Nature of Things, a first century didactic poem by the poet and philosopher Lucretius. Written in 7,400 dactylic hexameters, it explores Epicurean physics and is obviously ideal preparation for the coming trade negotiations, as well as being a massive subtweet to those of us who reach for Agatha Christie for our holiday reading.

It was the Daily Mail that revealed the location of the PM’s Highland hideaway. This has, rather bizarrely, led to accusations from some London-based commentators that the SNP had a hand in it, with the finger being pointed at local MP Ian Blackford.

In a way this is a back-handed compliment. Anything that happens in Scotland must be due to the SNP. But for folk actually in Scotland the idea of an SNP MP grassing anyone up to the Daily Mail – even Boris Johnson – seems unlikely.

And why would anyone in the SNP want to end the Johnson holiday precipitately? I don’t know about you, but for me the idea of the PM sat in a damp field in a badly put-up tent being eaten alive by midges while reading a first century Roman poet has a certain charm to it. It sounds very character building. He is, after all, going to need all the fortitude he can get over the coming months.

READ MORE: Now even the Daily Mail has had it with Boris Johnson on Scotland visit

The mystery of who grassed him up might not, in fact, be all that mysterious. Folk in the Highlands have phones and internet the same as everyone else, though this may come as a surprise to those who think remote means Brigadoon. Though perhaps it might have suited Boris to tell his ministers he was going to be off the grid for a while, particularly Gavin Williamson.

Of course, it could be that the source of the leak that cut the holiday short was a wee bit closer to home than that. Maybe it even came from inside the tent?

All joking aside, I do feel sorry for the Johnsons. They should be entitled to take a family break without media intrusion. The fact that someone alerted the Daily Mail to the location of their holiday did not actually oblige the newspaper to publish it.

It does occur to me that if Boris really wants to holiday unmolested in Scotland he might do worse than ask the Queen if she has a spare cottage she can lend him. She almost certainly does. The Daily Mail might be too scared to annoy the Queen by publicising it. And she could probably tell him how to put up a tent properly.