The afternoon that Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister, friends and I headed for Downing Street where, on the pavement, we passed round a bottle of cheap champagne and crowed. The gesture was jejune, but the triumph real. The Conservative Government remained, indeed had one more election victory to go. But she had gone. A witch's curse had lifted, the kingdom was freed.
It is hard to recall, 18 years on, the hatred that we felt for Margaret Thatcher. For those who had known no other leader - Harold Wilson and Edward Heath being mere Mike Yarwood Show turns - her premiership seemed immutable, eternal. That carping, chiding voice, was the soundtrack to our political awakening. Looking back it was not so much her economic policies that fuelled us, as we were penniless students, remote from industrial struggles. (And on full grants.) It was her cruelty and illiberalism: her contempt for the poor, those whose jobs she had removed, her Victorian judgment on single mothers, her intolerance of homosexuality.
No British politician was so hated. And none so loved. Monster or messiah- either depiction is more real than the two new ones being offered. Vogue this month celebrates Thatcher the style icon, photographed by Mario Testino, her shiny carapace handbags praised, her suits and pussycat bows judged seminal. Meanwhile, a television drama next week, The Long Walk to Finchley, depicts the young Margaret as a ruthless coquette, winning political favour by whirling around constituency balls in strappy taffeta and flirting with an alarmed Heath.
Nostalgia is airbrushing of the mind. Testino's Paris technicians have softened and erased lines until the Thatcher face resembles the smooth immobile mask of an embalmed Russian president. And nostalgia has sucked away the deep and jagged lines of history, of that divided and fraught time, rendered her cussed, uncompromising, terrifying reign into something safer yet far, far smaller.
Perhaps Baroness Thatcher should be aware of her great adversary Tony Benn's advice that the last political battle is to avoid becoming a national treasure: adored yet patronised, revered yet impotent. It is hard anyway to maintain rage at the old. Even when a Nazi war criminal, bent double, mind spent, is excavated from South America, one's head says prosecute, avenge, exact justice, but the heart says: “That pathetic husk? Why bother? Death will have him soon enough.”
And who, even of her old enemies, cannot pity the lioness in winter, frail, widowed, 82, with a ludicrous daughter and a dodgy son, her incendiary mind pecked away by old age. She now has the embattled sturdy-heeled durability of the Queen. When occasionally an old Leftie expresses the desire to stamp on Thatcher's grave - as Elvis Costello did long ago in his song Tramp the Dirt Down - it sounds not merely disrespectful but desperately dated.
Yet there are still those who seem to take advantage of her age. Invited for tea by the Browns and a “tour of No 10” - as if she didn't know her home of 11 years well enough - Lady Thatcher resembled a vanquished enemy general paraded in triumph. And one too out of it even to comprehend the humiliation.
And I am uneasy too about the motives of those who worship her, the Tory boys - now MPs or grandees - who feared Maggie in her pomp and who lately take turns to visit, to have her for lunch or squire her on outings. In her dotage, it seems, they finally have what they longed for - Maggie's attention, company, affection even. And now she can't hurt them any more.
But it is epic, Arthurian, this Maggie love: one day The Lady will return. Indeed two thirds of Conservative voters would today still prefer to be led by Mrs Thatcher in her prime. Perhaps it is nostalgia, after so many wilderness years, for a golden electoral age. Or after so much consensual politics, a longing for clarity and absolute conviction. Lately looking at the ghastly Olympic logo I thought of Mrs T wrapping a tissue from her bag around the awful trendified British Airways tailfins and wishing that it was still permissible for leaders to be stroppy and contrarian even if it made a public scene.
Will we ever again have a politician who prescribes that we drink bitter medicine for the country's greater economic good? Who might, now a recession is brewing, tell those who blitzed their credit cards and overextended themselves on cheap mortgages, that they were idiots, should retrench, quit whining and just suck it up. Maybe Gordon Brown's stern mien and heavy manner would have fared better in that more formal age.
Today while smart-casual party leaders compete to convince voters they are the guy that you would most like to invite to your barbecue it is thrilling to recall a politician who didn't ingratiate or lower the soapbox to our level. Mrs Thatcher's occasional referencing of humble housewifely thrift was mere political window dressing: no one could ever believe she was ordinary, one of us.
Consequently, the only importance of her clothes was not style or male desire or tabloid approval, but to construct a uniform of female power as anonymous and beyond discussion as a male business suit. And in this Margaret Thatcher had the advantage of living in a time when middle age gave women exemption from fashion's diktats and when they were not beseeched to make a life's work of striving to look sexy and forever young.
Vogue interviews Cynthia Crawford, described as Mrs T's dresser and companion, yet who remained utterly unknown during the Thatcher age. There were no Carole Caplin-esque scandals about a woman so intimate with the PM that she boasts “I could dress Mrs Thatcher in under four minutes”, no outcry that Margaret Thatcher was being grandiose in employing a quasi lady-in-waiting to obtain and colour code her outfits.
Fashion trivialises everything it touches. That Eighties style has returned to the catwalks at least twice since Lady Thatcher left power - including in 2004, when the American designer Marc Jacobs declared “this season is all about finding Margaret Thatcher sexy” - has helped to turn our memories of that decade into a retro-montage. Likewise, any historical figure portrayed in a quirky TV drama is immediately more endearing: even the spiky Mary Whitehouse seems cuddly when played by an actress as adorable as Julie Walters.
Rather Lady Thatcher's legacy is in all of us, even those who can hardly bear to admit it, who dreamt of her demise, who loathed her with a passion we will never muster again. We won the moral battle: even the present Tory leader supports gay civil ceremonies, voices support for the National Health Service and every shape of family. But Thatcherism haunts our everyday lives in its vanquishing of collectivism and with the ascent of the individual. I see it in every pushy parent, each fame-hungry reality TV contestant, whenever a mother sets up a small business from her kitchen table or someone says “because I'm worth it”.
It is attitude, not pussycat bows and handbags, that we owe to Mrs T.
