Nowhere did true blue Mrs Thatcher cause more faces to turn red than in Oxford; specifically those faces belonging to academics of the older school who felt she should not poke her nose into their business of setting standards in education for the rest of the nation to follow.

And no group of people expressed their discontent more loudly or more forcefully.

In 1985 Oxford University comprehensively snubbed her by turning down a proposal to grant her an honorary degree that had until then been offered to every Oxford graduate who had gone on to become PM. Mrs Thatcher, of course, was a graduate of Somerville College.

That it was a snub is not in question. I remember musing about this after reading Noel Annan’s book Our Age (Weidenfeld and Nicholson1990) in which he posed the question of why so many of the educated classes “hated the Prime Minister with a bitterness that had not been seen since the days of Neville Chamberlain”.

To her supporters, even here in Oxford, too many academics had been allowed for too long to identify their own self-interest with that of the nation.

Lord Annan wrote: “Teachers and medical consultants were to be judged on their performance, dons on the contribution to the nation’s need for trained manpower”

And, of course, this last point was seen as absolute anathema by her opponents here; monstrous interference.

But however she is remembered in Oxford, she will have a permanent memorial in the village of Uffington, ancestral village of her husband Sir Denis. He wrote in his will that following the death of his wife a memorial should be erected in the churchyard of St Mary’s Church. There is already a Thatcher Corner and a Thatcher Gate there, and a plaque to Sir Denis (1915-2003).