Last year, my son was at football practice when an old woman came to sit on the bench in the sun and watch them. “At first I thought she was Meryl Streep from the film,” he told me when he came home from school that day, “but then I realised it was the real Margaret Thatcher.’’ At half time, he had gone up to her to say hello and to explain that she should be watching the A team “not our D team as we’re all terrible”. Thatcher had smiled and said to him, “I never came to watch you enough, dear”.

Margaret Thatcher with her husband Denis (1915-2003) and their children Carol and Mark on the occasion of her Silver Wedding anniversary on December 13, 1976. PIC/Central Press/Getty Images