Margaret Thatcher told the Conservative party conference in 1989: “I went to Oxford University but I’ve never let it hold me back.” She was “only half-joking”, according to her biographer John Campbell. Others might conclude that she wasn’t joking at all.

Thatcher had no reason to feel warmly towards her old university, though she always remained well disposed to Somerville, her college within it. Four years earlier, after a bitter row that divided the academic community, Oxford denied her the honorary degree that tradition demanded she should receive. One had gone to all of her Oxford-educated predecessors, from Clement Attlee to ‘the Incredible Sulk’, Edward Heath. The depth of feeling against Britain’s first female prime minister, while it surprised the outside world, was really no great secret here.

Early in her premiership, in February 1983, I discovered how deeply she was disliked by many in her old college when I covered the unveiling of a portrait head of her there by the celebrated sculptor Oscar Nemon. As Mrs Thatcher glad-handed her way around the gathering, elderly Somerville dons were almost queueing up to drip poison in my ear about her. Whatever the distinction she had achieved in the world of politics, for them she remained the callow chemistry student they had first met nearly 40 years before.

Even the public pronouncements from senior college figures during her premiership hardly seemed especially warm. The Nobel prizewinning crystallographer Prof Dorothy Hodgkin OM said: “One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay and yet there was something that some people had that she hadn’t quite got.” At the Somerville gathering, Prof Hodgkin told me (on the record): “I didn’t see her as a prime minister, though there again, I didn’t see her as a chemist either.”

An honest view, perhaps, but I remember wondering at the time, if it really needed to be expressed.

For her part, Mrs T. spoke of her heartfelt admiration for the college. She called it a place where background had mattered nothing, and where she had met many people who had remained friends since. “Coming to Somerville was really the greatest thrill of my life.” Lady Thatcher’s name will live on in the college, not only through the sculpture but also in a portrait painting officially unveiled in 2005. Both are displayed in the Margaret Thatcher Centre, which was opened in 1991, with funds raised by former principal Baroness Park of Monmouth. This is in constant use for conferences, lectures, seminars, parties and the like. It holds about 60 people. Above is an attached building of comparable value to the college. The Hodgkin Building is a particularly fine student block, with good-sized rooms arranged in pairs, each two sharing a kitchen and bathroom. In the student days of Margaret Roberts — who was even then, incidentally, noted for her ‘queenly’ demeanour by fellow members of the Oxford University Conservative Association — such facilities would have been unthinkable.

When the building opened, the rooms were considered exceptionally luxurious. Now lots of students have, or expect to have, access to kitchens. A college insider tells me: “The simultaneous completion of a building named for Mrs Thatcher and one named for Dorothy Hodgkin was a clever way of reconciling Fellows to the honouring of Mrs T, since it was balanced by the entirely uncontroversial honouring of Dorothy Hodgkin.”