THE WOMAN with the ‘mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula’ will be laid to rest on Wednesday.

Her admirers are gushing like a broken drainpipe over her achievements and demanding a state funeral; the haters are waving vicious placards and singing Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead.

In death as in life, Margaret Hilda Thatcher is dividing the nation.

Those of us who actually lived in Thatcher’s Britain know that truly, it’s what she would have wanted.

All that in-fighting and debate, the controversy, the police getting stuck into the fray and her, once again, at the centre of political life in this country.

Most of the time I couldn’t stand her. But, like everyone else, I couldn’t ignore her either which is why I insisted quite a while ago that I’d be the person to write her obituary for this newspaper.

Researching it I learned something of her better qualities; she was not a snob, tried to put ordinary people at ease and was a staunch supporter of ChildLine.

She was a performer of many little kindnesses but, as we witnessed, was happy to perpetrate massive cruelty on those she didn’t approve of.

She also made you realise just how pathetic politicians are today.

Can you remember ANY speech or even a phrase from a speech made by Messrs Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, or Millipede?

Do you believe that this shower even believe a word of what they tell us?

Maggie did. She not only believed her policies, she lived them. And that’s why she emerged as a towering political colossus.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and in Thatcher’s Britain the leader made sure to surround herself with cringing, whinging, yes-men pygmies.

Her regime can best be summed up as riots, strikes, nuclear missiles, riots, a war, the market, riots, the poll tax, handbags, get-rich-quickery and more riots.

You had to be there to appreciate it but don’t worry if you weren’t because her legacy is very much with us.

There are still little children who never knew their granddad because he died fighting to retain the Falklands, which wouldn’t have needed to be retained if Maggie’s cost-cutting zeal hadn’t trimmed its military protection to the bone.

There are still families living in the north of England in the particular kind of hopeless poverty that comes when your village’s only employer has been taken away and not replaced, because the Prime Minister wanted to punish you for humiliating her predecessor.

If you’ve ever wondered why we all have to pay the best part of one and a half grand to heat and light our homes you are experiencing the legacy of Maggie’s bonkers mine-shutting-and-flogging-off-of-our-national-energy-companies-to-greedy-foreigners policy.

And if you hate the way that austerity means you can’t go on holiday or pay the mortgage; if you can’t understand why each and every household in the UK has to pay an estimated £40,000 to bail out the bankers, then trace the trail of crumbs back to Maggie; she’s the person who started the de-regulation ball rolling.

She was very successful but then she damn well should have been because the People’s Maggie was a woman fortunate in her enemies; Michael Foot, a leader of the Opposition who was away with the political fairies, a tin-pot general in Argentina, a rusting Iron Curtain and a mining industry lead by an obstinate Marxist donkey.

It was a fabulous hand and she played it fabulously until that fateful day when, as Lord Tebbit so eloquently put it, she was left at the mercy of her friends.

It’s said they stabbed her in the back but they weren’t as good as that. They just mugged an old lady when she wasn’t looking.

I can understand why so many people are actively dancing on her grave although I don’t condone it; it’s disgusting.

But they have entirely missed the point.

She may have expired on Monday amidst the lonely grandeur of the Ritz Hotel. But the Margaret Thatcher who provoked such mighty passions actually died on November 28, 1990, the day her own MPs kicked her out of Downing Street.

She was forced to spend the rest of her time contemplating what might have been.

For her that must have been torture and that is why, despite everything, I hope she can now rest in peace.

Should parliament have been recalled so that MPs could pay tribute to Maggie? Definitely. Anything which gets them back to work in the middle of their never-ending Easter break certainly gets my vote!