Lady Thatcher is being lined up for a state funeral, so the Mail on Sunday revealed at the weekend.
I was filling a gap in the news team rota and checked it out. It's true. Since Lady T is in relatively good health, sometimes frail, fine at other times, they tell me, it's only a talking point. At nearly 83 she's six months older than the Queen, but has led a more taxing life.
What will people make of that, I wonder? In a letter to today's Guardian, Erin Pizzey, redoubtable founder of one of the first refuges for battered women, recalls the "Milk Snatcher" tag and says a letter sent on her behalf expressed the view that Mrs T - as she then was - was "not interested in women's issues".
"A state funeral would be an insult to this nation," Pizzey declares. I'm not sure that's right, are you? It's true Maggie was never much of a feminist; I think she felt women should just stop whingeing and get on with it.
I once suggested at a press conference that she never acknowledged the role of luck in human affairs.
"Your career rests in part on having a handy London seat, on marrying a rich man..." At which point, she exploded in an entertaining way. Denis wasn't rich etc etc.
Maybe, but he did fund the chemist through exams which turned her into a barrister. As a candidate and young MP she did have nannies for the twins etc etc. We never got to the luck bit, it's not something she would take much notice of, more likely to hit it with that chobham-armoured handbag.
But she was the first woman to rule over the British state - as distinct from merely reign - since the great Queen Elizabeth died at 70 in 1603, having in the course of a long and brilliant career executed the last woman to rule over the Scottish part of said state, her cousin Mary.
That's quite an achievement, and I suspect that wiser, more forgiving feminists quietly acknowledge it, despite Maggie's lack of sympathetic imagination - what it was like to be someone not like herself - which stretched far beyond feminism.
In any case, she was very much a man's woman who could flirt when she had to. Even an old roué like Alan Clark was completely in thrall to her.
Together with her lack of a sense of humour (you could always wrong-foot her by making a joke), this lack of generous sympathy was, I still think, a crucial reason behind her failure to attract more affection, as distinct from respect - and a good deal of loathing.
She was apparently very kind to people whom she knew - minions included - but remote and scolding to most of us. Churchill, for all his faults, was very human.
In today's Guardian G2 Stuart Jeffries has done a better job than I did on Sunday afternoon in setting out which non-monarchs have clocked a state funeral, from Sir Philip Sidney in 1586 (Good Queen Bess was also a man's woman) to Churchill's in 1965. Drawn by a sense of history I watched the gun carriage pass up Ludgate Hill towards St Paul's on that occasion.
But Churchill had been largely forgiven, at least in England, by virtue of his heroic wartime leadership between the fall of France in May 1940 and the American entry into the war after Pearl Harbour, December 7, 1941, an event which - correctly - prompted the old boy to say: "So, we have won after all."
My old friend, Alan Watkins, recalls that Churchill's face was booed whenever it appeared on the newsreels in his local cinema in South Wales during the war - in contrast to Stalin, who was always cheered. Welsh miners had not forgiven him sending troops to Tonypandy as home secretary 30 years before. Voters in Dundee also kicked him out.
Lady Thatcher has not been forgiven for the harsh medicine she dished out in the 80s. It was all avoidable, many people said - and still do.
So it was, except for the awkward fact that the Labour and trade union movement in the years before her 1979 landslide seemed unable to sustain the social democratic settlement which the post-war Attlee government had created (1945-51) and a succession of moderate Tory governments more-or-less respected.
This is not the place to discuss what happened, but readers who weren't around should know that Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey and Michael Foot created quite an egalitarian pay policy - restraint in return for public spending, the "social wage" - in the hard years of 1976-78. But it depended on cooperation with the unions that faltered after Jack Jones retired as the powerful leader of the TGWU.
Result? The winter of discontent, in which one feature of the disorder, along with serious public sector strikes, was Maggie, then opposition leader, supporting skilled workers at Ford and elsewhere in seeking to restore their squeezed pay differentials.
People still argue who was most to blame, but the outcome was that Thatcher got a mandate for change in 1979. And boy, did she use it!
All this was part of a wider picture, the reaction on both sides of the Atlantic against the corporatist postwar settlement. Even Richard Nixon had used pay policy. Ronald Reagan spearheaded the reaction over there, his friend Margaret over here.
I remember likening it to someone who owns a Volvo, safe but sensible until he/she decides that the old crate will go faster if the safety features, bumpers, airbags, eventually the brakes, are thrown away. It took 30 years to have the kind of free-market pile-up we may be in the middle of today.
Be that as it may, Thatcher changed the political and economic weather in this country like no prime minister of the postwar era, probably like no one since Lloyd George.
And she wielded power with formidable courage and resolve. Those Tory pols who said "Don't worry about Margaret, we'll take her in hand when she wins" either came to heel or got their marching orders. Thatcher in her prime was quite something.
Of course, it ended in tears - it usually does - and the manner of her going plunged the Conservative party into a civil war which only Michael Howard's leadership resolved (says me): he was accepted by both factions. David Cameron is the beneficiary.
The story goes that when Dave went to pay his respects to the Lady it wasn't one of her good days and she had to have it explained that, yes, this boy was actually the party leader. But then, I bet Churchill would have swallowed his cigar on being told about her promotion had he staggered on to 1975. Or would have done until she'd got to work stroking him.
