That’s not about me personally, it’s the way he related to people.

Ms Le Grange was reacting to a speech by President Jacob Zuma in which he said that South Africa's problems started in 1652 when Dutch settlers led by Jan Van Riebeeck landed on the Cape of Good Hope.

“If he saw I felt insecure — when we met the King of Saudi Arabia, for example — he took my hand. “Few people are able to accept their own racism,” she says, “but you have to admit it to recognise change in yourself. The British come off particularly badly, with Clarkson asking Mandela if he’d had a lap dance and the Spice Girls boasting about stealing toilet paper from his house.

It can’t just be professional, it’s an emotional connection.”

Did she sacrifice children for Mandela? He spoke to her in the Afrikaans he had learnt to charm his prison guards and she began to shiver and cry. He ate abstemiously, never indulging despite the austerity of life in prison. I wouldn’t have thought of a black man’s hands being important to me.”

When she met at 23 he also smiled at her and this is her last memory too.

Of course I was, full-on.”

As a teenager she had only the vaguest idea of why Mandela was imprisoned; perhaps for stealing a car? Was it therapeutic for him to be served by a white person after such long subjugation?

Why were some of his relatives angry with you? “When the ANC criticised him about me, he defended me, brushing it off as his choice, his business.”

The reality was that the pair found in each other an emotional compulsion: she was seeking a parent figure who would never abandon her; he, scarred by civil war, needed total loyalty.

But she is not an apostle: she is careful to note that although Mandela was a very great man he was by his own admission not a perfect one. But it does not mean we should not be critical of our state of affairs," she said.