IT IS new year and I told the editors here at William Rust House: “Every other publication has a holiday special at this time of the year and we should too.” 

What I had in mind was taking myself off for a week or so in some popular resort. 

A glance at some other publications gave me a good idea what was the go-to destination this year. Mustique in the Caribbean seemed to be the No 1 choice. It was all over the papers and the TV news.

A few days later I was getting down the steps of the British Airways flight in Barbados. BA economy air ticket £1,300 — emissions 16.5 tonnes of CO₂. 

From Barbados there is a two-engine six-seater Otter plane that runs a 45-minute shuttle to our final destination. Cost of a shuttle ticket £2,000.  

The shuttle brings us to our final destination the private island of Mustique, set in the turquoise waters of the Grenadines. 

Nice and warm with manicured beaches of silver sand and turtles swimming in the crystal clear waters — clearly this climate change nonsense and plastic in the sea is all exaggerated.

Over the years Mustique has been the favoured holiday spot for the very rich, from royalty like Princess Margaret to Mick Jagger, who both had houses here. Now in the news are Mustique’s latest visitors — our Prime Minister and his girlfriend.

Perhaps Johnson and Carrie Symonds were hoping to rub shoulders with some of the millionaires and billionaires that holiday in Mustique. They include Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and some Chanel perfume heiress.  

Various multimillionaire tycoons from the fields of Swiss banking, Italian parmesan cheese, designer clothes or pornographic magazines share Mustique holidays with gangsters and dodgy politicians.

Best-known island royalty was Princess Margaret. When second in line for the throne, she famously entertained many lovers here. One was Roddy Llewellyn, a society gardener half her age. 

The affair with Llewellyn and the rude pictures of the couple on the Mustique beach led to the first royal divorce scandal of modern times — there have been many since.

More beach pictures that showed the Queen’s sister actually at it with gangster John Binyon led to a right royal scandal. 

Those pictures ended up in security bank vault in Baker Street, London. In 1971 British security forces authorised a huge bank robbery to recover the pictures. At the time a gagging D-notice stopped the media reporting the crime. 

In the end even Princess Margaret just wasn’t rich enough to live in Mustique. She had been given her house by an admirer, Colin Tennant. Tennant had bought the entire island in 1958. He was married to Lady Anne Glenconner, Margaret’s close friend and lady-in-waiting. 

In 1996, five years before she died, Margaret gave her son David Linley her Mustique house. He sold the property in 2001 to 
Irish-American couple Jim and Bruce Murray. 

Minor royalty, including our very own Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, William and Kate, use the island too. They can usually find somebody who can be leaned on to lend them a villa.

Randy Andy, Prince Andrew, used the island to entertain various girlfriends including soft-porn star Koo Stark and page three model Vicki Hodge among countless others.

Later Andrew changed his allegiance to his friend and convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s 70-acre private island Little St James, where, according to locals, the girls were much younger. 

Epstein flew the young girls and Andrew to the island on one of his two private jets that became known locally as the Lolita Express.

Now Mustique has become the chosen destination for our Prime Minister Johnson and his girlfriend Symonds. The couple hadn’t brought any children along. Perhaps Johnson couldn’t remember where he had left them, or indeed how many he had.

Let’s have a look at the couple’s holiday accommodation. Their villa in Mustique resembles a mini-fortress set in lush woodland. Normal rent is £20,000 a week but Johnson has had a bit of luck and is borrowing the holiday home from a US acquaintance.

Talk in the island bars says that Johnson apparently met a man in a barber’s shop they both use in New York, and the American offered him the place as he wasn’t using it.

The PM and his girlfriend have their own staff including a really good chef. There are four-poster beds and open-air terraces set around a pool. The couple stayed there for two weeks from Boxing Day.

There is only one real drawback for 31-year-old Miss Symonds. If she needs to call the police, if her boyfriend turns nasty or something like that and she or a neighbour needs to call the police they can’t. The island doesn’t have any police.

Symonds and her boyfriend celebrated the new year in Mustique’s famous Basil’s Bar, where for decades the great and the good have partied in privacy. 

Johnson no doubt tried the bar’s signature and very expensive cocktails such as the Hurricane David or Mustique Whammy. The bar is set on stilts over the turquoise waters of Mustique’s Britannia Bay. 

The island has perfect white beaches studded with huge pink shells and fringed by imported palm trees. There are plenty of “Private” signs posted by the Mustique Company that owns and runs the island. 

You won’t find cruise ships in the harbour, only occasional yachtsmen drifting by and they are rapidly sent on their way. 

Mustique is certainly spectacularly expensive. Only the very wealthy, European prime ministers and Morning Star writers on generous expenses can afford it. 

The only hotel, the 20-bedroom Cotton House charges £500 to £1,250 per person per night. Breakfast is extra, my bowl of cornflakes cost a tenner.

Prices go up at Christmas and new year. A week at this time of year costs around £15,000. 

Holiday homes here range from between £2 million and £20m and running costs are steep. Most houses are used by their owners for about six weeks a year but most are staffed with butlers, cooks and maids all year round. 

Most owners, however rich, recoup some of the cost by renting out their homes — that’s how they get so rich. Rent for four- to nine-bedroom villas range from £15,000 to £30,000 per week and can be arranged through the Mustique Company.

Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry in a withering attack accused Johnson of “sunning himself, drinking vodka martinis” in the Caribbean instead of dealing with the Iran crisis. 

She pointed out that Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwell had been left to chair three emergency Cobra meetings about the assassination of Qasem Soleimani during the Prime Minister’s fortnight absent.

Thornberry also suggested the Prime Minister was staying silent because he was “afraid of angering Trump.”

Now Johnson in back at No 10 I don’t know about you, but watching him make such a mess of being Prime Minister, I think I would prefer it if he was permanently marooned on a desert island.