LAST week a Downing Street spokesman backed off what appeared to have been earlier advice that, if people wrapped up against the cold a bit more, they could reduce their energy bills. Why withdraw such perfectly sensible advice?

I can understand the sensitivity. I often visit elderly people in winter to find them sitting in their drawing rooms in overcoats and scarves. They are already taking precautions and to offer advice telling them to do what they are already doing smacks of complacency of the “let them eat cake” variety. That is why I think it was important to protect winter fuel payments and to increase pensions annually by the higher of inflation and average wage increases.

For the rest of us, however, the advice must stand. I am continually turning down the thermostat and telling my family to put vests and jumpers on if they are cold. It is ridiculous to overheat a house and then wander around dressed as if it were a summer’s day in the middle of winter.

I still wear suits my grandfather wore – their weight is in marked contrast to modern lightweight suits.

Consider that a man would have worn thicker vests and shirts, a waistcoat, and then the suit jacket. With the way people heat their homes and offices nowadays you’d boil if you dressed that way.

I grew up in houses without central heating and I recall the joy of being as warm as toast in bed, with heavy blankets and a hot water bottle in a very cold bedroom.

Then there was the fun in the morning of drawing with your fingernails on the frost that had formed on the inside of the window pane.

If we want to keep our bills down we are going to have to turn the temperature down.

I know that some politicians believe that they can just freeze our bills, but that will have as much impact on their relentless rise as King Canute’s command to the waves to recede.

Politicians cannot control energy prices any more than they can control the tides.

World energy prices are rising because of growing, and increasingly affluent, populations in what we used to call “the developing world”, who now want their share of electricity and all the life-changing advantages that go with it.

If we are going to be able to escape an ever-rising spiral of energy bills we will have to cut ourselves free from dependence on fossil fuels and replace them with nuclear power and the free energy delivered by the sun, the wind and the tides in order to generate our electricity.

Harnessing this energy requires investment in technology. This investment comes at a price, currently a charge of some £100 on your annual bill.

It is supposed to be temporary, until those energy sources are sufficiently developed to be able to deliver without subsidies.

Oil and gas prices, however, will go on rising forever (although less quickly if we can harness fracking).

So, put on another layer – you know it makes sense.