IF I ever publish my memoirs, the chapter called ‘Encounters with Prime Ministers’ will be a short one.

Gordon Brown once invited me to Downing Street for a charity do and I accepted, only to receive an impersonal note telling me the event was oversubscribed and my invitation cancelled. When John Major did a walkabout in Helmsley during the 1994 European elections I heard his minder, who I knew, whisper: ‘This one’s Martin’ — at which the Prime Minister grasped the hand of the bloke next to me and declared, ‘Martin, nice to see you again’.

As for Margaret Thatcher, when I was introduced to her at a dinner for the launch of her second volume of memoirs, she gave me a laser look and hissed ‘Yesss…’ — which I took to mean ‘Yes, you’re the worm that wrote that mischievous Spectator article about my first volume of memoirs, and don’t think I’ve forgotten’.

Prime ministers are only human, after all, and it is perhaps a distortion created by the modern media world to regard them with such elevated awe or hostility that tiny anecdotes like these are re-told, as though they were a different kind of being. Let’s agree that Churchill would have been larger-than-life in any era, but others from Baldwin to Callaghan are remembered as ordinary men just trying their best in a difficult job.

Have we put Margaret Thatcher on too high a pedestal these past weeks — either to throw old mud at her, as Howard Keal did in this paper last week, or to shower her with the eulogies that filled the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail?

Was that ‘ceremonial’ funeral, for all its beauty and dignity, completely over the top?

My own answer to those questions, perversely, is ‘No’ to the first and ‘Yes’ to the second. I think she really was a big historical figure who, by personal leadership, changed Britain for the better. I was working abroad for eight of her 11 years in power: every time I came back, I could sense positive changes in the economy, in social attitudes, in national self-esteem — and that has never happened in any other period of my adult lifetime.

Every time I got into a taxi somewhere foreign and far away, the driver wanted to talk about her.

Of course some of that impact was a reflection of shifts that were happening anyway: the collapse of Soviet communism, the failure of our nationalised industries, the hubris of union militancy.

Of course, she couldn’t have done it without the folly of the Argentine junta.

Of course, with hindsight, we can agree that it might have been better done with more compassion for those it left behind.

But love her or hate her, she was a political colossus — an ordinary citizen who rose to an extraordinary challenge. In that latter sense, the funeral was somehow too much; the more fitting tribute was the ten-day national debate about her that preceded it.