Ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s funeral will take place in London on April 17, David Cameron’s office said yesterday.

Loathed and loved, she crushed trade unions and privatised swathes of British industry

Her body was removed overnight in a transit van with police escort from the Ritz Hotel where she died on Monday morning following a stroke.

Her final journey will take her from a chapel inside the Palace of Westminster – where she will arrive on a gun carriage drawn by horses from Queen Elizabeth’s artillery.

The Queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, will attend the funeral, which is likely to be the grandest for a British politician since Churchill’s state funeral in 1965.

Though accorded full military honours, Thatcher did not want a state funeral. She will be cremated.

Admirers of Margaret Thatcher yesterday mourned the ‘Iron Lady’ who, as Britain’s longest serving Prime Minister in over a century, pitched free-market capitalism as the only medicine for her country’s crippled economy and the crumbling Soviet bloc.

World leaders past and present, from former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to US President Barack Obama, led tributes to the grocer’s daughter who sought to arrest Britain’s decline and helped Ronald Reagan broker an end to the Cold War.

“The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend,” said Obama.

While world leaders praised the most powerful British Prime Minister since her hero Winston Churchill, the scars of bitter struggles during her rule left Britain divided over her legacy.

Opponents celebrated in London, the English city of Bristol and the Scottish city of Glasgow, cheering her death and toasting to the death of “the witch” with champagne and cider.

“We’ve waited a long time for her death,” said Carl Chamberlain, 45, unemployed, sporting a grey ponytail and sipping on a can of cider in Brixton, London, the scene of riots in 1981.

Loathed and loved, Thatcher crushed trade unions, privatised swathes of British industry, clashed with European allies and fought a war to recover the Falkland Islands from Argentina.

Yesterday’s newspapers told the story: “The Woman Who Saved Britain”, declared the Daily Mail, while the Daily Mirror led on “The Woman Who Divided A Nation” in an article that questioned the grand, ceremonial funeral planned for next week.

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