Cameron praises Thatcher as 'one of the greatest prime ministers of all time'

Until Gordon Brown invited Thatcher - for reasons I still find hard to fathom - for coffee at Downing Street, even the Tories were uneasy over their relationship with one of the most contentious Prime Ministers in British history. Indeed, it was Theresa May - herself a Tory - who came up with the term "the nasty party" to describe how the British public had come to view the government's of Thatcher and Major.

Now however, since Brown's bizarre decision to invite the old witch round for elevenses, Cameron is free to publicly embrace her in a way which would have been unthinkable a few short years ago.

David Cameron lavished praise on Margaret Thatcher as "one of the greatest prime ministers of all time" last night, saying she had rescued the British people from "despair".

As he presented his predecessor with a lifetime achievement award, the Conservative leader described her as one of the "towering figures of the past 50 years".

The notion that Thatcher "rescued Britain from despair" is very much at odds with the memory of anyone who lived through her time in office.

Indeed, her time in office could probably be described as the epitome of despair. She campaigned to reduce unemployment by running on a slogan of "Labour isn't working" when the number of unemployed rose to one million. When she entered office she then introduced policies which she knew would increase the number of unemployed - she took the number to a record breaking four million - who she then renounced as "social security scroungers".

She devastated Britain as a manufacturing base and attacked Britain's mining community as "the enemy within".

There really is no way to amply describe how divisive a figure she is on the British political landscape. Indeed, such is the hatred she engenders even to this day that someone decapitated her statue when it was erected at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London. Even Tony Banks, the left wing Labour MP and chairman of the Commons advisory art committee who paid for the statue, admitted it was "among our most controversial commissions".

Indeed, until now Cameron has been very careful to distance himself from some of Thatcher's most controversial remarks, especially her contention that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.

Nor has the Thatcher camp issued any sort of apology for statements of this kind. In fact, when Cameron stated that Thatcher was wrong to have spoken of Mandela in this way, her former press secretary Bernard Ingham was quoted as saying, "I wonder whether David Cameron is a Conservative."

And now, partly due to Brown's coffee morning invitation, the woman who once said, "There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families" and who denounced General Pinochet's arrest as a "kidnap" "which would do credit to a police state" is being hailed as "one of the greatest prime ministers of all time".

She once famously said "The lady is not for turning" and neither am I. Brown and Cameron can perform all the historical revisionism that they want, but nothing will ever make me revise my opinion of that hateful, divisive and cruel woman.

She devastated entire communities, she deliberately orchestrated division whilst rejecting the whole notion of consensus:

There are still people in my party who believe in consensus politics. I regard them as Quislings, as traitors... I mean it.

So you'll have to forgive me as I reach for the sick bag whilst Cameron and Brown attempt to publicly reinvent our collective memory of the Iron Lady. I remember that old witch far too well for this nonsense to carry any weight at all.

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Tags: David Cameron, Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown