They’re the sort of holiday snaps that could make you choke on your Coco Pops. I mean the ghastly photos of Richard Branson and Barack Obama having their kite-surfing holiday together on Beardie’s secret hideaway island of Necker in the Caribbean.

In one of the photos it really does look like the ex-President and the Virgin boss are — how can we put this delicately? — in a relationship. Like a honeymoon couple frolicking with each other in the balmy Caribbean wavelets, or play-fighting like puppies on board Branson’s high-powered speedboat.

At least when Tony Blair holidayed at Cliff Richard’s place in Barbados they had the dignity not to be photographed horsing around in the swimming pool.

Isn’t it rather demeaning for a man who only last month was the most powerful figure in the world to be gurning for the camera in his swim shorts with a businessman who is surely Britain’s most egregious self-publicist?

The pictures of the pair on a kite-surfing holiday make Branson and Obama look almost like honeymoon lovers

But then, maybe the past few days have been a mere stepping stone towards Obama spending the rest of his gilded life rubbing shoulders with the global elite of the corporate and entertainment worlds. And making lots of money, of course.

He could head back to his unglamorous old stamping ground of Chicago, and commit himself to the gruelling task of trying to solve that city’s dreadful problems of poverty and violence.

Instead, as these holiday snaps strongly suggest, he will join the ranks of the super‑rich, giving speeches and signing mega-bucks book deals.

Perhaps Obama and his wife Michelle have enjoyed chillaxing in Necker’s palatial ten-bedroom Balinese-style villa with its designer interior of Brazilian hardwoods, Asian antiques, Indian rugs and throws — all so impeccably internationalist and in tasteful keeping with the world-embracing vison of these two great men of our time.

All in all, it is a wondrously symbolic picture that tells us so much about why voters on both sides of the Atlantic rejected their elitist establishments. Both men are losers, of course.

In Sir Richard’s case, he is a loser because he campaigned loudly for Britain to remain in the European Union, and then refused to accept the result when the people voted for Brexit.

As for the former President, he is a loser because he, too, argued vociferously, and cynically, against Brexit. He famously tried to interfere in this country’s national referendum when he threatened that leaving the EU would mean we went ‘to the back of the queue’ for a trade agreement with America.

Branson, who is kite-surfing off the coast of his private island, had previously told people in Britain that they should not vote for Brexit

(Instead, our economy has boomed since Brexit, and Theresa May was the first foreign leader to visit the White House, where Donald Trump has already promised a trade deal for Britain.)

But Obama also failed in his goals on his own side of the Atlantic.

After eight years in the White House he is generally perceived to have fallen far short of the grandiose dreams he offered America when he took office.

A weak leader of the free world, nervous about asserting U.S. power abroad (particularly in the Middle East, with catastrophic consequences for that region), preferring soaring speeches to action, this was the great liberal hope who left America more racially divided than when he came to power.

And on the question of his much-vaunted concern with climate change, how did Obama travel to Necker Island, one wonders? Private jet, of course.

He also campaigned for Hillary Clinton to succeed him, to continue the reign of his beloved Democratic Party.

Yet he failed in that, too, because neither he nor she — both wealthy, establishment figures — understood the despair and anger that engulfed so many millions of Americans. It was their rejection of his globalised liberal values that led to the election of Trump.

Pictures like this show exactly why people in Britain who actually live here are not willing to listen to Bremoaners like Branson, lecturing from their speedboats and private islands

Trump and Brexit, the result of two popular revolts which served above all to show that men like Branson and Obama, who like to think they wield such influence and power, can sometimes be entirely powerless.

That’s why these Caribbean pictures offer such a telling insight into the political earthquakes of the past year: the billionaire and the statesman, giggling like schoolboys on a private island, utterly removed from the cares and fears of the ordinary people who finally discovered they are the ones who hold power in their hands.

The little people don’t tend to figure much when the ‘great and good’ get together on private Caribbean islands, or in the exclusive talking shop economic summit at Davos, or at the secretive Bilderberg conference that brings together heads of state around the world.

They like to rearrange the world to suit them. And what unites Branson and Obama, along with a love of kitesurfing and emitting hot air, is a contempt for Brexit, and for the people who democratically voted for it.

Obama never hesitated to show his disdain for all things British anyway, from removing the bust of Churchill from the Oval Office, to cynically referring to BP as ‘British Petroleum’ after its Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded.

But people like Obama (pictured), who campaigned for Hillary Clinton, and Branson, who campaigned against Brexit, failed in their tasks

Branson meanwhile, lectures the nation from his sunlounger via the Virgin website, telling us that Brexit means ‘Little England’, while Remain means ‘Great Britain — democracy, compassion, justice and inclusion’.

(The opposite of the truth, of course: Brexit means casting off the yoke of an unelected and unaccountable Brussels and European Court, and the rebirth of a sovereign, dynamic, world-trading nation, freed from the retrograde state-socialism of the myopic EU mandarins.)

Because people like Branson think money can get them whatever they want, the tycoon secretly bankrolled a dubious campaign to derail Brexit, and was trying to overturn the result last year on the specious grounds that the Referendum was ‘advisory’, not ‘binding’.

Do you think he’d have been calling for a re-run if he’d won?

A leaked email last November revealed that Branson had pledged at least £25,000 towards the costs of this shady campaign.

Fellow Remoaners in his cabal, it emerged, included the Labour MP Chuka Umunna, Nick Clegg (who earlier campaigned for an EU referendum) and Bob Geldof, who revealed so much about himself with his grotesque antics on the Thames when he swore at hardworking British fishermen showing their support for Brexit. The spectre of a cossetted multi-millionaire pouring scorn on ordinary people concerned about their livelihoods was one of the most telling images in a very dirty referendum campaign.

Obama, who joined Branson with his wife Michelle in the British Virgin Islands after finishing his second term as President

No doubt these high-minded progressives will continue to lecture us from their mansions and harangue us from their private jets, telling us how much they care about compassion, justice and inclusion.

One might note in passing, though, that Necker is one of the British Virgin Islands, and that Branson is now officially resident there, not in the UK, for most of the year.

By amazing good luck, this entitles him to a whole raft of generous tax breaks: island residents aren’t subject to capital gains tax, inheritance tax or corporation tax, and income tax is virtually non-existent.

Necker (pictured, with Obama kite-surfing) is one of the British Virgin Islands and Branson is now resident there

But Branson himself, this celebrated social justice warrior, says that he’s become a Necker resident for his health. He explains that he can ‘play tennis’ and ‘do Pilates’ there, which apparently is just not possible in the UK.

How funny you find all this may depend on whether you’re one of those workaday types who still lives in the UK and pays tax at the normal rate.

The British people led an extraordinary revolt when they voted for Brexit — a vote that rang out around the world.

They refused to be cowed, bullied or frightened by the apocalyptic Project Fear warnings of corporate behemoths such as Goldman Sachs and Unilever, and they didn’t listen to the then U.S. President either (support for Brexit actually went up in the polls after his intervention).

Yet still, the self-serving global elite — of which Obama and Branson are such shining examples — do not, and will not, get it.

They will not stop plotting, in boardrooms and on yachts, for their vision: a world made safe for the free movement of their own capital, for cheap immigrant labour, for beneficial tax schemes and the erasing of troublesome national borders and identities.

And they will continue to mask their cold-blooded ambitions in all the one-world claptrap of ‘inclusion,’ ‘diversity’ and ‘global harmony’ that we know so well.

If you consider the steely, ruthless self-interest that lies behind those smiley PR-friendly holiday snaps on Necker Island, they start to look little short of repulsive.