With some trepidation I ventured to London yesterday, to the House of Commons. My afternoon visit had nothing to do with the big event of the day, though a number of those present will certainly have been at the funeral of Baroness Thatcher. Whether this passed off without unpleasantness will now be known. As I write, the day before the service, I can only express the hope that nothing unseemly will mar the nation’s farewell to a great figure of our time.

As it happens, I am one who believes the scale of the funeral to have been excessive. This is a view taken, too, it would seem, by the journalist Matthew Parris, who was one of the speakers (Maria Miller, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport was another) at the Commons reception I attended yesterday. This was to launch the Buxton Festival, which takes place in the delightful Derbyshire spa town in July.

Writing in The Times last Thursday, Parris — who worked closely with Thatcher during his days as a Tory MP — argued that precedent had been “overwhelmed by sentiment”.

“I adored Margaret Thatcher,” he wrote. “And yet I cannot help feeling a twinge of discomfort for the doubters: that part of our country — as much as a third of the population — feeling a bit flattened by this Force 10 gale of respect. For holding what’s in fact a very substantial minority opinion, they must feel almost like heretics, convicted of Thatcher denial.”

Nowhere was this gale of respect more evident than in the pages of the Daily Telegraph which is owned, like the location of Baroness Thatcher’s demise, the Ritz Hotel, by the twins Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay. For two or three days it was is if all other news had ceased to happen.

To be fair, though, the newspaper did not stifle criticism of Thatcher or of the arrangements for her funeral. There was, for instance, a well-argued piece by Peter Oborne concerning the attendance of the Queen at St Paul’s. He claimed this set an unfortunate precedent and made her appear partisan.

“All one can do now is hope that [the] funeral is not allowed to turn into a triumphalist Tory occasion that inflicts permanent damage on the monarchy”.

In this connection, it is interesting to note the identity of some of the rather unsavoury characters with whom the Queen will have been rubbing shoulders at the cathedral.

They included Jonathan Aitken, who is said to have “broken the heart” of Carol Thatcher and was later jailed for perjury. This period of incarceration developed into a nice little earner for Aitken, who has become a much-used ‘rent-a-quote’ on matters penal in the years since.

Inevitably, another perjurer jailbird, Lord Archer, was on the guest list too.

When people like Sir Fred Goodwin and HBOS chief Sir James Crosby are being stripped (or stripping themselves) of knighhoods, it seems astonishing that Archer is allowed to cling on to the greater honour. One recognises that there are constitutional complications, but these could surely be overcome.

Mention of titles reminds me of that held by one of the principal mourners at the funeral, Carol Thatcher’s twin brother, Sir Mark Thatcher.

Himself a business figure with some dubious associates, Thatcher would never in normal circumstances have been allowed to add ‘Sir’ to his name. Lady Thatcher hit upon a back-door method of honouring him when she persuaded John Major, early in his premiership in 1991, to award a baronetcy to her husband, Denis Thatcher.

This was the first such creation since 1964. There have been no others since.

As Thatcher’s biographer, John Campbell, put it: “This bizarre resurrection ensured that Mark on Denis’s death in June 2003 would inherit his title.”