Comments policy

I do not allow partisan comments on obituary posts on this blog. That policy was introduced well before Margaret Thatcher died, after someone posted a partisan comment on the obit post of a local government officer in Copeland which caused offence and upset to his grieving family.

The ban affects criticism of the person who has died but I also consider it inappropriate to use someone's death to make an inaccurate attack on another person (especially if the person who has died was famous for promoting reconciliation.

For that reason I have removed a debate which was developing on the Nelson Mandela obit thread which included the untrue suggestion currently being spread by badly-informed people on Twitter that David Cameron was one of the small group of headbangers in the late and unlamented FCS who who thought it would be funny to wind up left-wing students in the mid 1980's by wearing "Hang Nelson Mandela" badges.

As a student at the time I had the misfortune to meet (and was strongly opposed to) the people concerned and I can personally confirm that David Cameron was not one of them. If you are not willing to take my word for it, this has been fact-checked by the New Statesman - not exactly friends of DC - and they refute it here. The people "responsible" - if you can use that word - for the anti-Mandela material were mostly at Warwick University, and none of the Conservative students from David Cameron's University, Oxford, would have touched it with the proverbial barge-pole.

I was not amused or impressed by the anti-Mandela stickers and badges at the time, any more than I would be now. Like the vast majority of British people including most Conservatives I thought Mandela's conviction was a travesty of justice and supported the campaign for his release.

The people who circulated the anti-Mandela stuff were so far out of the mainstream that they were among those who subsequently provoked Norman Tebbit into shutting down the Federation of Conservative Students for being too right wing.

Yes, it sounds like a joke, but that's really what happened.

All the main parties had problems with their student wings at the time - Labour had to suspend NOLS, the National Organisation of Labour Students, and don't get me started on ULS, the Union of Liberal Students ...

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