Hour of surrender

The proposal to change Britain’s clocks has returned, this time with tacit government support.
It makes no sense — except perhaps in Brussels

Since the day I flew backwards across the International Date Line I have known that you should not mess around with time. On that occasion I left Siberia on Monday morning and arrived in Alaska the previous Sunday afternoon in time for lunch. This was and remains confusing, though it offers disproof of the old cliché that you cannot put the clock back. Though I have been to North Korea and Bhutan, I still count it among the most startling journeys I have ever taken. It lasted about an hour.

And it is about an hour that sets me — and I hope you — apart from Rebecca Harris, one of those homogenised, UHT female Tory MPs, all glowing with forward-looking verve. And gosh, she is forward-looking. She wishes us all to live an hour further forward than we already do, getting up in the dark for most of the winter, and watching Newsnight in summer while it is still light outside. It wouldn’t much matter what Mrs Harris wants, were it not for the fact that there are recent rumours that the Prime Minister has decided it might be expedient to take her side.

Rebecca Harris calls her campaign ‘Lighter Later’, though its measurable effects mean it could equally well be called ‘Darker Later’. I have annoyed her supporters greatly by baptising her scheme ‘Berlin Time’, a jibe which I’ll come back to shortly. She wants to term it ‘Churchill Time’, an unconvincing reference to the exceptional period of virtual war communism between 1940 and 1945, when there was a grave shortage of farm workers and it made sense to put off sunset as late as possible in summer to get the harvest in.