It is 5.45am, but I’m awake and there’s no chance of further shut-eye. Because out in the back garden, my feathery clock radio, the bloody cockerel, is loudly embracing the dawn.

I lie in bed planning its death. Should I “accidentally” leave him out for Mr Fox? Would drafting in the ex-Royal Marine who told me overexcitedly how he killed a goat in Afghanistan constitute excessive use of force?

A fortnight ago this bird was one of five silent, genderless chicks we hatched in August. Now it is a caricature of male awfulness: noisy, greedy, indiscriminately randy and it doesn’t even supply me with scrambled eggs in bed. The only people pleading for his pardon from death row are my elder son, who has Bernard Matthews-style poultry plans, and my mother-in-law, who finds its cockadoodling pleasingly bucolic, but then she no longer has a pressing day job. To my sleepless South London neighbours I say: address your wrath to them, not me — I’m on your side! And I’m sorry. Very.

But in one sense the wretched rooster is right: 5.45am is morning in mid-March. Awake at this unaccustomed hour I find the garden flooded with light, the sun half-way up the sky. Since evenings are — until we finally move the clocks forward next weekend — beginning at about 6pm, what are we thinking? Even in the depths of winter, 35 per cent of us are asleep when the sun rises, wasting these precious rays.

Of course, the debate on daylight saving has been raging for decades, with the advocates of double summertime — whereby clocks do not go back in October but go forward a further hour in March — usually classified with flat-Earthers, UFO-botherers and the kind of misguided women who think Michael Buerk is signalling he loves them when he wears a certain tie. But this week, the cause of light over dark finally entered the mainstream when the Daylight Forum Discussion Group at the University of Exeter was attended by Ben Bradshaw, the Culture Minister.

An actual Government Minister who regards adjusting the clocks for lighter evenings as a “no-brainer”; will lobby for its inclusion in the Labour Party election manifesto; and backs a three-year trial starting as early as October so we can enjoy maximum daylight in time for the Olympics.

To some of us — we SAD-sufferers who have struggled through this most hard and never-ending of winters, who will feel next weekend when the birds are still singing in the garden at 7pm, that the world has lusciously unfurled like a magnolia blossom, that the day has simply become a roomier space in which to fit your life — this is a mighty cause for hope.

Except I’m worried about Gordon Brown . . . Asked about the plan when he visited the West Country recently, the PM replied obliquely that it was “worthy of consideration” and that he was “thinking carefully” about the switch. Which, of course, is Politician for: “OK, Devon and Cornwall, your tourism industry might benefit by millions and your geography means you currently squander even more sunshine than London, but do you really think I’m going to risk the wrath of my fellow Scots?”

Ah, the Scottish farmers, that legendary force of darkness whose needs override all others. On Farming Today, a programme I’m awake to hear now that I live by cockerel-time, a Scottish NFU leader had to concede that yes, late dawns were meaningless when his entire membership was blessed with electric lighting. All he could summon to support his opposition was that if it was too dark to spot a poorly pig until 11am, maybe the vets wouldn’t be able to treat it the same day — or might have to work an hour later in winter. And because of this theoretical inflexibility of veterinarians in Argyllshire, homebound office workers of Britain will not enjoy daylight from November to March.

And what is the problem with dark mornings? Last month I visited Iceland, where it wasn’t properly light until 8.45am. It meant no blinking from sleep into rude sunshine and the day didn’t properly arrive until you’d consumed enough coffee to deal with it. At a latitude of 69 degrees North — about 10 degrees above Scotland’s outer isles — Icelanders have learnt to be thrifty with daylight, since in December they get barely five hours.

So Reykjavik, despite being almost halfway to New York, sticks to GMT all year round, which means they tolerate darkness until gone 10am so they can enjoy a nice bit of afternoon. And Icelandic farmers never carp.

Yes, “no-brainer” is just about the right phrase for double sunshine. It is far safer: we are less likely to have accidents on dark mornings than dark afternoons — indeed, during the last trial of double summertime, from 1968 to 1971, there were 2,500 fewer people seriously injured or killed on the roads.

And it is life enhancing. A day that gets dark at 4.30pm means kids go straight home to noodle around on the Wii rather than have a football match outside. Putting the clocks back in October makes us fatter, lazier, more housebound and depressed. It means an earlier curfew for worried elderly folk who hate leaving home after dark; the plan is endorsed by Age Concern.

Double summertime is exactly the kind of blue-sky — literally! — policy that the new Tories should be leaping to inject into their own manifesto. When last polled three years ago, 54 per cent of British people supported the clock shift. As the Conservatives struggle to square the circle between looking green and serving business, they could choose an option that unquestionably benefits both.

Later evenings are a £3.5 billion-a-year boon to tourism — by allowing people to stay out later on British attractions — while carbon emissions would drop by 1.2 million tonnes, since we would be relieved of the need for lighting for an extra hour a day.

So why have the Tories not committed to something so magnificently simple and happiness-making? Certainly they are not under the sway of the Scots, who could, anyway, be given their own separate time zone (one hour and ten years behind England), like a real country. But maybe the Tories wonder whether the blood pressure of their nuttier fringes would be able to cope with the symbolic oppression of British clocks marching to the federalist tick of European mainland time.

But someone please sort it out soon. I need the sleep and either the clocks change or the cockerel gets it.