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Grant Shapps is to cut his holiday short and race back to the UK in order to sort out the same quarantine fiasco that requires him to self-isolate for two weeks upon his return. 

The transport secretary only began his holiday on Saturday and appears to have spent most of it dealing with the government’s last minute change to travel rules for Brits on holiday in Spain.

In a decision announced just five hours before it came into force, Spain was removed from the UK’s list of safe destinations after it saw a spike in the number of coronavirus cases.

In a statement on Monday evening, Shapps said: “Thousands of people have seen their holidays disrupted or cancelled due to the necessary emergency imposition of quarantine restrictions on Spain.”

He added: “I think it’s right to get back to work in the UK as soon as possible in order to help handle the situation.

“The sooner I get back from Spain myself, the sooner I can get through quarantine. So I’m leaving my family to travel back to the UK on Wednesday.”

In a separate development, the rules that had only applied to the Spanish mainland have now been extended to cover the Balearic and Canary Islands.

The decision comes after the Spanish government said it was in talks with the UK about excluding the Balearic and Canary Islands from its quarantine measures.

But health minister Lord Bethell said: “Within individual countries there is no way for us to control intra-country transport, it is therefore very difficult and challenging to have a regional exemption list, and that is why we’ve not been able to give exemptions to the Balearics.”

The announcement happened amid fears more European holidays could be thrown into disarray this summer with reports of potential new coronavirus lockdowns in France and Germany.