There is a joke from the old satirical puppet show Spitting Image which says as much about Margaret Thatcher, and how she was viewed, as any insightful personal anecdote:

As she is having dinner with her Cabinet colleagues, a waitress comes to take the order: “Would you like to order, sir?” Britain’s first and so far only woman Prime Minister is asked. “Yes. I will have the steak.” Waitress: “And what about the vegetables?” Mrs Thatcher: “Oh, they’ll have the same as me.”

Whatever one’s view of the Iron Lady – which was the title given to a recent film that placed unfair emphasis on her battle in later life with Alzheimer’s, a condition which also afflicted her great collaborator Ronald Reagan – there is no denying her status as a remarkable figure.

This was a woman whose political philosophy – it even had its own name, Thatcherism – had as its backbone one essential premise: that one could achieve anything one desired in life if one worked sufficiently hard to achieve it.

This, of course, can only hold in a society that provides its members with equality of opportunity. But happy to ignore that, she chose instead to use as a shining example her own life experience. The daughter of a grocer from Grantham not only did exceptionally well at Oxford, but in an age when women in Britain were seen as little more than bit-part players in politics she dared to take on all the establishment men in the Conservative Party and, to their collective chagrin, beat them at their own game.

It is indicative that when she first became Prime Minister of Britain in 1979, only one member of her Cabinet had voted for her when she contested her bitter rival Edward Heath four years earlier. Using that man, Keith Joseph, as her mentor, she set about a radical purge of her first set of ministers and changing the focus of economic policy in Britain to what politely became known as monetarism.

More impolitely, it was a policy that was heartless, as the Thatcher government effectively split the UK into two halves: the prosperous south, where free market capitalism ruled with all the good and bad that brought with it; to the bitterly depressed north which even today has not fully recovered.

There is no doubt that certain things needed to be done, such as loosening the stranglehold of the unions which had destroyed her predecessors and ridding Britain of its state-run company inefficiencies while going full speed ahead with privatisation. It is the latter that prompted a remark that defined her reign: “You turn if you want to (which was a barbed reference to Mr Heath), the lady’s not for turning.”

This steadfast, uncompromising approach won Mrs Thatcher few friends. By 1982, she was the most unpopular Prime Minister in British history with riots taking place across the country. But the following year – the Falklands conflict being a crucial intervening, if controversial, factor – she beat a miserable Labour Party by one of the biggest landslides in British political history.

This make-or-break election provided Mrs Thatcher, a conviction politician if ever there was one, with a platform until her downfall in 1990 – which she did not see coming, because she earnestly believed all the decisions she took were “right” – when, as the vultures of economic crisis were circling, her Cabinet seized an opportunity presented by Michael Heseltine for mutiny.

As she left Downing Street in tears, few cried with her. But Mrs Thatcher will forever be remembered as a transformational figure.