Next time pack your morals, Tony

What could be nicer at this time of year than a winter break on the Red Sea? I'm sure that Sharm el-Sheikh makes a pleasant change from Downing Street, and at least Tony and Cherie Blair are paying for their holiday this year. Last December their trip to the same Egyptian resort was paid for by the country's President, Hosni Mubarak, and the inevitable bad publicity prompted the Prime Minister to make an equivalent donation to charity.

This year, the family is staying in the same hotel, but in private apartments rather than the special government wing. No official talks have been scheduled but the President has a villa at the resort, and the two men may meet to discuss the conference that Blair will host in London next month in a new attempt to find a settlement in the Middle East.

Nothing wrong with that, you might say, especially when the Bush administration has sidelined the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to pursue its obsessive feud with Iraq. But I would love to know whether the Prime Minister, as well as reading up on the resort's many attractions – diving, camel treks, visits to Mount Sinai – has bothered to acquaint himself with the dreadful human-rights record of his host.

It is a dismal story of torture, censorship and corruption, stretching back over two decades and filling thousands of pages of United Nations reports. It also raises the question of whether the Prime Minister – especially this one, with his self-imposed mission to promote democracy and human rights – can afford the luxury of behaving like any other tourist when it comes to choosing a holiday destination.

I am aware that thousands of British visitors turn up in Egypt each year to see the pyramids, take Nile cruises or lie on a beach. Most of them neither know nor care that Mubarak presides over a sham democracy where people who oppose the regime are detained without trial, whipped on the soles of their feet and tortured with electric shocks. Three British men, on trial in Cairo for allegedly propagating the ideas of a banned Islamic organisation, have made credible claims of torture to their families and the British ambassador.

Only last month the UN Committee Against Torture expressed concern about the abuse of under-age detainees, including sexual harassment of young girls, in premises controlled by Egyptian State Security Intelligence. There are plenty of countries in the world whose governments do not sanction torture, and Blair's decision to visit one that does, two years running, looks insensitive at the very least.

It also confirms a more general impression that he is relaxed about his relations with Middle Eastern despots, as long as they are not Saddam Hussein. Earlier this month he welcomed Syria's personable young President Bashar al-Assad to London, in spite of his dreadful human-rights record, a point I made to a Cabinet minister at a party the other night. I couldn't resist launching into a complaint about torture in Syrian jails – I know, I am such fun at parties – and the arrest of democracy campaigners in Syria over the summer.

The minister seemed genuinely surprised, yet if you work for a human-rights organisation, as I do, there is little to choose between the governments of Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Western leaders are endlessly indulgent towards the first two, while apparently prepared to go to war with Saddam, an example of double standards that can only offer ammunition to sympathisers of Osama bin Laden. The tragedy of the Middle East is not just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the fact that so many millions of people are condemned to live in states where democracy and freedom of expression remain an impossible dream.

I imagine that the Prime Minister is weary, and in need of a break after the frenzied and hysterical attacks on his wife's choice of friends in recent weeks. Egyptian tourist officials claim that the family had the holiday of a lifetime last year, which may be why they have gone back to the same place. But Blair is not a private citizen, making a private visit, as the Egyptian President's involvement in the earlier trip confirms. Let's hope he has a moment to reflect on his choice of friends as he strolls on the beach with Cherie.