DAVID CAMERON has provoked anger among traditionalist Conservatives with an attack on Margaret Thatcher’s policy towards the former apartheid regime in South Africa.

He said that she was wrong to have branded Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress as “terrorists”, as he sought to put further distance between himself and the Thatcher era.

Writing in The Observer, the Tory leader praised the former South African President — who he met in Johannesburg last week — as one of the greatest men alive. “The mistakes my party made with respect to relations with the ANC and sanctions on South Africa make it all the more important to listen now,” he wrote. “The fact that there is so much to celebrate in the new South Africa is not in spite of Mandela and the ANC, it is because of them — and we Conservatives should say so clearly today.”

Mr Cameron, who has already contradicted Baroness Thatcher’s claim that “there is no such thing as society”, irritated her allies. The Observer quoted Sir Bernard Ingham, her former spokesman, as saying: “I wonder whether David Cameron is a Conservative.”

Lady Thatcher’s policy was also defended by Lord Tebbit, her former party chairman, who said that Mr Cameron had failed to understand what had happened. “Because of his age, Mr Cameron is looking at these events as part of history. Others of us who lived through them and had input into the discussions at the time see things very differently,” he said.

In the 1980s Lady Thatcher caused controversy when she refused to back sanctions against South Africa. In 1987 she said that anyone who believed the ANC would ever rule South Africa was “living in cloud-cuckoo land”.

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