This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

What would you think of a car speedometer that said you were going 10mph faster or slower than you were? How about bathroom scales that told you that you weighed a stone more than you do? Or perhaps a school ruler that claimed to be a foot long but was actually only ten inches?

The idea is ridiculous. Measures are only any use if they correspond to reality. Yet, as of this morning, almost all the clocks in Britain will be inaccurate, and it will be by official decree. For the next seven months, only a few mouldering sundials will record noon when it actually happens.

Most people will probably not be sure, as they fumble blearily with household devices and timers, which way the clocks ought to be going. The whole thing is a mystery to 95 per cent of the population, yet we dutifully perform the ritual year by year. The time has come to think about it, because we at last have the opportunity to end this silliness. But beware. Zealots and fanatics are still scheming to force you to get up earlier than you want to for the rest of your lives.

The idea behind it is a cranky notion which makes Esperanto look practical. And it dates from the same Edwardian era of fads, cooked up by an irritable property developer, William Willett. He got cross because other people did not get up as early as he did. He was also annoyed that he had to stop playing golf when it got dark.

The solutions to these outbursts of petulance were simple. Someone should have said to Mr Willett: ‘First, leave other people alone. Property developing may not be as tiring as the jobs other people do and they may need more sleep than you. Second, start your game of golf a bit earlier.’

But Mr Willett, like so many other pestilent reformers, wanted to boss other people about. They were to be compelled to get up earlier and stay up later. Parliament repeatedly turned down the plan.

And then, during the First World War, the supposedly efficient Germans adopted the idea, claiming it would sharpen up their war economy. As it happened, they went on to lose the war. But wars, like all crises, are wonderful opportunities for cranks and fanatics, since everyone is looking for miracle solutions. MPs switched off their brains and said ‘If they’re doing it, so must we’, and we have been stuck with it ever since.

An even madder plan, to set all our clocks permanently to Berlin time, narrowly failed a few years ago, thanks largely to the efforts of this newspaper. If it had succeeded, we would have spent a quarter of the year having breakfast in the dark. The idea is always spread that only Scotland suffers from these changes, but actually they harm everyone, and they are much hated as far south as Spain, where General Franco pushed the clocks forward to please Hitler back in the 1940s.

Now, the European Union, which has ruled our time since 2001, plans to give up doing so. Whether or not we leave the EU, we will soon be free to set our own clocks as we wish. We can at last go back to Greenwich Mean Time, real, organic, British time, the whole year round.

But no, the clock-abusers are on the march again. A campaign is under way to fix our clocks at an hour ahead of GMT, summer and winter. Why? We did this from 1968 to 1971 and it was so widely hated that MPs voted overwhelmingly to bring it to an end. There is no evidence that it will do the slightest good. Claims of fuel savings and accident reductions are, to put it mildly, thin. The idea that the later sunset will stimulate everyone to go out and play tennis or run marathons is a nonsense. Most people will sit at home or in pubs, watching TV and looking at their phones, as they do now. It will just be harder to get children to go to bed.

Yet so-called Permanent Summer Time has lots of support among media types and politicians. And I will tell you why. Most such people never see the dawn. They have no idea whether it is light or dark before about 10 in the morning, or that this changes with the seasons. So they want to steal your morning daylight from you, and stick it on the ends of their evenings, so that they can watch Newsnight while it is still light outside.

Don’t let them do it.

Why is Charles doing PR for a brutal tyranny?

How very foolish of Prince Charles to go to Cuba, which is still an iron-bound tyranny. The Prince, who has often quite rightly resisted the way the Foreign Office sucks up to the Chinese despotism, should have flatly refused last week’s trip – seemingly devised by the Havana Tourist Board.

Perhaps he may have had qualms when, standing beneath a huge idol of the mass-killer Ernesto Guevara, he had to watch goose-stepping troops march past.

These, not the much-touted vintage cars and funky musicians, are the real face of Cuba. The Castros may have gone at last, but the people who still run the island maintain a secret police system that far outdoes East Germany’s Stasi, with agents in every street and block of flats. Dissent is still heavily punished. The prisons are foul.

Nobody has ever apologised for Fidel Castro’s cancellation of elections he promised 60 years ago – which still haven’t taken place – the show trials, the massacres or the torture. The smiling image is false.

The Prince should find a way to admit publicly that he should not have gone there.

The last nail in the coffin of marriage

As I have long predicted it would, the law has now changed to allow civil partnerships for heterosexual couples and this will come into force by the end of the year. At the same time, church marriages are in steep decline since country houses and other grand locations were allowed to host weddings.

This change, not the tiny issue of same-sex marriage, is the real sign of the times. The whole idea of lifelong marriage, as understood 50 years ago, has gone. Instead, we have a temporary contract, easier to walk away from than a mortgage.

Is it cos I'm conservative that the Beeb won't hire me?

With what looked like calculated rudeness, the BBC rejected my application for the post of Controller of Radio 4, with an unsigned email from some office in Birmingham. They didn’t even have enough of a sense of humour or adventure to ask me for interview.

How can a supposedly national institution be so totally closed to conservative opinion? I’m no less qualified than several of the names I’ve heard mooted as possible choices.

Actually, I think it’s not just that they want Radio 4 to be a Left-wing propaganda organ. We knew that. They want to subject it to the semi-literate cult of youth that has swallowed so much of the Corporation, driving away older listeners in the name of modernisation. And they know that people of my generation would resist that.

I can’t pretend to be surprised, but from time to time I think we all need to make small gestures against the cultural revolution that is wrecking so much of what we value.