Do you remember at the end of summer/beginning of autumn we had that unseasonably warm spell? One last burst of lovely weather before we plunged into the, what always seems like, endless misery of chilly drizzle. It was beautiful and I decided that I wanted to go for a swim in the sea, not something I have done for a since I was a child. There is a very good reason I hadn't done it for so long, I can't swim very well. I am verging on the point of being described as a non-swimmer. This didn't put me off however because I was sure that I had exaggerated in my head how poor I was at swimming. I thought that I must be able to swim a bit and I had been making myself out to be rubbish at it for comic effect and through my overuse of the phrase “Martyns don't float” had created a self fulfilling prophecy.

To cut what I could turn into a long story short (and this really is a short version of what I could have written), with a worried looking Significant Other standing on the shore having dialled two 9s on her phone and with her finger hovering over the 3rd 9, I entered the sea.

This being Weymouth I had to walk out bloody miles to get ever knee deep and, gentleman I'm talking to you here, you know that bit when the cold water laps against what were once your dangly bits but have now shot back inside faster than a startled snail, that bit that was always the worst part about getting into slightly chilly water, well I can assure you that it is still unpleasant.

I finally managed to get waist deep and decided this was deep enough and went for it. It turns out I was correct with my initial memory, I can't swim and I was as bad at it as I though I was. It wasn't just all in my head.

Is there a reason I am telling you of this idyllic sounding late summer afternoon in Dorset? No, not really, just enjoying the reminiscing and a little self deprecation. Ok, maybe there is a reason. My mind can play tricks on me and can be a little unreliable. 

I had sort of begun to think that maybe, just maybe, I had been exaggerating in my mind how awful, and possibly evil, the Tories are. I was reasonably young when the last Conservative government were in power and really very young when Margaret Thatcher was PM but never the less I clearly remember the effect that they had on the country.

During the last election I listened to the debates and what all sides had to say and, whilst I would never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever vote Tory, David Cameron did sound a little bit different to other Conservatives, you know, not evil. Maybe they had changed, despite the majority of their MPs being the same people that were in their last pretty much everything and everyone hating administration. Maybe it was only in my head that they were a cross between Death Vader (with Mrs Thatcher being the Emperor obviously) and the demon that possess Regan in The Exorcist.

So they came into power and immediately started cutting stuff. They kept saying, and still keep saying, that they needed to cut the deficit, it is their only economic idea. Cut Government spending and get the borrowing down seemingly forgetting that if we the people don't earn anything or spend anything then they the Government will have no income and will have to borrow more.

They cut spending on libraries, stupid, mean and short sighted but not actually evil. They freed Universities to raise their fees to a maximum of £9000, stupid,mean and short sighted but not evil. They keep saying that the want to role back health and safety legislation and make it easier for employers to fire people taking us back to the time of Victorian mill owners, nasty and clearly profits-over-peoples-lives-because-the-scum-are-disposable but evil? Maybe not. Cutting benefits for pretty much everyone on them, unpleasant but perhaps not evil, however putting out Government sanctioned press releases briefing against Disability Living Allowance claimants making misleading claims about how easy it is to get this benefit is getting pretty damn close. Attempting to privatise the NHS, throttling the BBC, don't know that you could describe these as evil. There are many other things that they have done and said (see pretty much anything thing the Nadine Dorres supports) which are nasty and unpleasant to my left leaning eyes but not necessarily evil. Clearly it was all in my head. They are not evil.

I, for one, am glad that we have cleared that up.

Oh, just one more little thing. Cluster bombs are currently illegal. These are horrible weapons that are made up of lots of little bombs inside a bigger bomb. The biggest problem with them is that many of these smaller bombs (referred to, rather cutely, as bomblets) fail to detonate when they are supposed to thus littering the place they are dropped on with unexploded ordinance. I would go so far to describe these weapons as evil, they kill indiscriminately and they go on to kill and maim for years after the conflict is over but it's OK because the UK is a signatory on the legislation that banned them and no one in their right mind would ever consider rolling back on this would they? No, don't be silly, of course they wouldn't because that would make them actually evil. Oh. According to the Independent “Britain is backing a US-led plan to torpedo the global ban on cluster bombs, in what MPs and arms campaigners fear is an attempt to legitimise the use of weapons that are widely deemed to be inherently indiscriminate.”

So it wasn't just my mind playing tricks on me, Tories actually are evil, not comedy evil, child slaughteringly evil.