THE weather in England was “predominatingly mild” in October 1925, according to the daily reports compiled by the Air Ministry.

So if you imagined huge claps of thunder and flashes of lightning over Grantham, with birds screeching as they flew every which way, portending great troubles to come, when Margaret Hilda Roberts made her earthly debut — sorry to disappoint.

But her shadow doth lengthen and, as her all-too numerous admirers celebrate her centenary, which fell on Monday, it darkens further.

It fell heavy on Manchester Central Convention Centre last week, taking up space that might otherwise have been occupied by the Conservative Party conference. That latter event stirred little interest and attracted few attendees.

With hangdog Tories shunted into a side hall at the former railway station, which was even then seldom anything near full, the vacuum was filled by, inter alia, a display of the dresses worn by Margaret Thatcher, as Roberts famously became.

Some of the Tory representatives would doubtless have wanted to fall to their knees before this shrine if not for the apprehension that they would have been unable to easily rise once more unassisted.

The only surprise is that some enterprising Thatcherite has not cut the garments into small squares and sold them as indulgences to the faithful or offered the opportunity to touch a hem for a consideration as a cure for scrofula. The Baroness herself, a champion of private medicine, might approve.

The invocation of her name certainly works wonders in some parts. This newspaper was once again initially denied a pass to attend the funereal conclave in Manchester.

No argument — free speech, membership of the press lobby — availed against this Trumpian edict until your correspondent pointed out that he had attended many Tory conferences when Thatcher was leader and, indeed, had met her personally.

Within five minutes of confiding these facts, the Morning Star was admitted. The prospect of turning away a hand that had shaken the hand that had gripped socialism by the throat was obviously too much for my young interlocutor.

He may well have hung a picture of the heroine on his bedroom wall — something former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron unwisely confessed to during the 2017 election campaign, conjuring images no-one wished to linger over.

“Predominatingly mild,” Thatcher surely was not. The sobriquet “Iron Lady,” first coined by the newspaper of the Red Army in 1976 as possibly the main contribution of that worthy journal to the history of political invective, was not meant as a compliment but was warmly embraced by its recipient nonetheless.

She has thus become an icon for every posturing ninny wanting to strike a macho pose in politics, as well as for the genuinely dangerous. In which category is Shabana Mahmood, the new Home Secretary, who has recently declared Thatcher an inspiration to her? We shall find out, but there are scant grounds for optimism so far.

Nigel Farage, of course, lays claim to the mantle. In a sense that is surprising, as he and his kind could present themselves as lifestyle victims of Thatcherism — far from the most deserving of our sympathy — in that her deregulation of the City in 1987 put an end to the long lunches and afternoon slumber parties in the office which constituted the work regime the Reform leader found most congenial.

Farage zigs and zags to and fro on issues like state economic intervention, on which it is hard to imagine Thatcher vacillating. The coalition he seeks to build is not hers, and Farage’s Thatcherism is no longer out and proud but concealed from working-class voters as far as possible.

He does truckle in anti-immigrant sentiment and in this he follows Thatcher, whose 1979 remark about “people feeling rather swamped” was the most consequentially racist intervention in politics by a major figure, at least until Theresa May’s “hostile environment” and Keir Starmer’s speedily reversed “island of strangers” riff.

Thatcher’s own party offered not one but two claimants to the great inheritance in Manchester. First up was Kemi Badenoch, the candidate of brutal fiscal rectitude, all deficit reduction and tax cuts, partying like it was 1981 and Geoffrey Howe was donning his hairshirt.

The other, rather more sinister, was Robert Jenrick, brazenly seeking to dislodge Badenoch in the name of the insurgent nationalist populism spearheaded by the US President. He wants to sack disobliging judges and appoint others of his own choosing while paddling freely in the rhetorical pond of 20th-century fascism.

Jenrick, one suspects, does not actually believe much of this and could with facility revert to being the Cameroonian liberal Tory he so recently was. Less Iron Lady, more Vicar of Bray with extra cynicism — and malice — thrown in.

If he succeeds in his ambitions, most likely after the voters have passed terminal verdict on Badenoch’s efforts in May next year, the way will be clear for some sort of pact with Reform which, if it were able to consolidate existing stated voting preferences without too many defections in other directions, would be set fair for a very considerable Commons majority come 2029.

Would that be a worthy continuation of the Thatcherite cause? One may assume that conventional Conservative/Treasury economic priorities, a la Badenoch’s speech, would prevail over Farage’s demagogic diversions in such a government’s programme, so no Heathite nonsense there.

And the culture war, the sustained assault on democracy? It might be objected that Thatcher herself showed no large interest in undermining constitutional norms, and it is true that had she lost any of the elections she fought as leader — she didn’t — she would not have unleashed her supporters to rampage through Westminster to overturn the result.

But then she did fire the director-general of the BBC, Alasdair Milne, for not toeing the Thatcher line, and appointed the dim-witted evangelical George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury in revenge for the insufficient enthusiasm displayed by senior Anglican clerics for her cause, “woke” before that was a thing. So the right-wing assault on institutions on account of their supposed “liberal bias” is not such a new development.

She was more concerned about international law than Donald Trump and his epigones, famously berating Ronald Reagan for invading Grenada in brazen violation of its provisions and without regard as to how the prime minister could explain this outrage against a Commonwealth member-state to the Queen.

But if defending an apartheid state is front and centre in contemporary politics — we can all intuit where Thatcher would end up on that.

Having once been favoured with an extended and whisky-sodden exposition of Denis Thatcher’s views on the subject of South Africa, your reporter can confidently assert that the suffering of the Palestinian people would not elicit a Thatcherite tear.

Others will surely compose extended assessments of Thatcher’s legacy. All that needs saying here is that the damage she did to the working-class interest, our society and the world is by no means yet repaired.

And her malign legacy continues to stir in the undergrowth. Thatcher once asserted, during the voluble phase of her retirement, that her main achievement had been “forcing our opponents to change their mind,” a process given vivid form in New Labour and its leader.

So she would have greeted the news that her vampirish protege Tony Blair is to be visited on suffering Gaza as a neocolonial governor with an icy cackle. One might say it would have gladdened her heart if only …