Nothing is more provoking than an appearance by Alex Salmond on the TV news. Who could forget his inaugural demand on being elected First Minister, that Scotland should be given its own separate Olympic team.

No doubt Glaswegian babies twice as likely to die in infancy than those born in Esher, the tenants of Britain’s most deprived estates and the men in Scottish cities who can’t, statistically, expect to hold 60th birthday parties will agree their most pressing national issue is that England doesn’t steal credit for the curling medals.

Or after suicide bombers were foiled outside Glasgow airport, Salmond’s first utterance was that the terrorists weren’t from Scotland, indeed “had not been in the country very long”. Phew, that’s just peachy, then.

Since its citizens are beyond reproach, global terrorism is not a pressing matter for the SNP administration. It is not the iniquity of Scotland’s students being exempt from top-up fees, its cancer patients having superior access to life-saving drugs or its elderly receiving non-means-tested nursing home places that heats my English blood, but Salmond’s underlying pointless, puffed-up parochialism.

I think a lot about Alex Salmond at this time of year, as the earth chills and every single day darkness falls four minutes sooner. Because I know it is only two weeks until British Summer Time (BST) officially ends, we put back our clocks and thus are plunged into night a whole hour earlier. To clarify, on October 27 it will get dark in London at 5.36pm, but on October 28 (after BST ends) at 4.35pm. It is the year’s most melancholy day, that crude kerchunk into winter blackness, just as we’re finally reconciling ourselves, by increments, to the death of summer.

A day which ends at 5.36pm can include a post-school game of football, an afternoon walk, a trip to the shops without fear of walking alone through dark streets. It feels like a proper day, not a sunless swizz.

When the sun sets at 4.35pm, it’s straight home to telly, computers, mooching around for four hours until bed. I mention children here – and those who endure the torment of entertaining them indoors during daytime darkness – because while the flexitime, working world can set its own hours, and flip open its laptop at dawn to earn an early cut, school hours are granite set.

But while our increasingly lardy offspring could do with another hour outside burning off their burgers, adults too suffer when the afternoon gloom descends, as it does in late December, at 3.30pm. Around five per cent of the population suffers from seasonal affective disorder, and I suspect I am one of them, thrown into irritabilty and bleakness by winter. Buy a special light bulb, we SADdos are told, take homoeopathic potions, even “visualise positive images of winter”. (Like what? Skeleton trees? Chapped fingers? Christmas hysteria on Oxford Street?)

And why “visualise” when we could realise an extra hour’s sunlight, to make even the shortest day of the year more tolerable? To bang on about daylight saving, I fear, throws one into the well-meaning nutball category, along with Flat Earthers and the sandwich-board man who used to distribute leaflets in Leicester Square warning that eating protein made you lustful. The last legislative attempt to keep to BST throughout winter, while doubling it between March and October, was by Lord Tanlaw, a crossbench peer famous for inserting the case for lighter evenings into every conceivable debate. His Bill proposed a three-year experiment in daylight saving, with the constituent parts of the British Isles being offered the chance to opt in or out as they chose. The Government swatted it down.

But then some arguments simply cannot be felt by politicians. I once heard Tony Blair questioned whether he supported green tax on plastic bags and he dismissed the idea with a mystified air, as if struggling to recall what it was like to shop in a supermarket. Likewise what do politicians, enclosed for 15-hour days in their halogen-lit halitosis factories, care when the sun rises or sets?

And yet for David Cameron, who still has the oxygen of the real world in his lungs, daylight saving would be a mightily groovy policy, being popular, green and almost entirely free. Simply, if we rose, worked and slept more in synchrony with the daylight hours, we would use less energy. We’d have darker mornings, but not everyone rises early and requires a light, whereas almost everyone would save by switching lights on later in the evening.

Daylight saving has always been used during times of national economic emergency: by all combatants throughout both world wars and by Nixon during the 1973 US energy crisis. Mr Cameron’s mate Arnie has authorised a study into its efficacy in California. Winston Churchill was a daylight-saving freak, the CBI, the Local Government Association and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) were all raring to try out Lord Tanlaw’s experiment. What are we waiting for? Oh, the Scots . . .

Still the main barrier to the rest of Britain enjoying a longer afternoon is its alleged unpopularity with Scottish farmers. It was they who scuppered a similar experiment in the early Seventies. And it is true on December 30 in Stornaway, northwest Scotland, where dawn does not break until 9.16am, it seems harsh to extend that to 10.16am. Even so, animals follow circadian rhythms, not watches, and the Scottish National Farmers Union concedes that floodlights and technology mean farmers can work just as capably in the dark. As for Scottish children, they already have to trudge to school before dawn. Far from endangering them, the Scottish RoSPA believes that ensuring it is daylight when they travel home would save many lives.

Or Scotland could always opt out of Lord Tanlaw’s experiment and keep its clocks an hour behind. You would think the SNP would love that: a separate time zone, just like a proper country. Many nations do have regional time variations: in some American states like Indiana clocks vary between counties. But no, the SNP line is firm, the rest of Britain must stay in darkness, because it fears Scottish trade would suffer – with England.

But perhaps there is a way to stir the SNP from its mire of illogic, antiquation, selfishness and inflexibility. I have a plan guaranteed to excite Alex Salmond: in return for restoring an hour of sunlight back to English skies, Scotland can have its very own entry in the Eurovision Song Contest.

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