Friends and former foes have been generous and ungrudging in their praise of Lady Thatcher in a city that played an important part in her life from the darkest days of the Second World War.

Many of her biographers detected in her memoirs a lack of warmth towards her old university, compared with affection expressed by other statesmen such as Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins.

But in a way it is typical of the woman’s honesty that she did not disguise her discomfort and shyness in a strange world, where perhaps for the only time in her life she was patronised by self-confident young men.

And as the Principal of Lady Thatcher’s old college tells us today, the former Prime Minister recalled her love for her time at Somerville, remaining deeply loyal to the college, returning quietly as an honorary Fellow and helping discreetly with fundraising Biographers also made much of how she was snubbed by her old university, when it denied her an honorary degree in the most public way imaginable.

And while you would look in vain to discover her feelings in her two-volume autobiography, there is no doubt that the Iron Lady found the rejection hurtful, perhaps confirming her view that she was always an outsider at Oxford. At the time the former Prime Minister and then university chancellor, Harold Macmillan, denounced the dons for their lack of courtesy and responsibility.

Yet it was difficult to accept Supermac’s assessment on speaking to Prof Denis Noble, the Oxford academic most prominent in denying her the honour. For it is difficult to think of a more courteous and clear-thinking Oxford scientist, and today he expresses no regret. It was never personal and he insists that ultimately the stand helped secure the funding for education and research that he maintains the former Oxford scientist was cutting.

The arguments over the brain drain and research funding now belong to the historians — but we can be sure that Oxford will always figure in any account of Margaret Thatcher.

Thankfully, there was a complete absence of malice and hypocrisy this week expressed by those who had once fought her policies tooth and nail. Baroness Thatcher, as she later became, polarised public opinion like no other British politician of the modern age. She set the tone and shape of the Britain we live in today and left behind as many enemies as she did loyal supporters. While it is clear that the episode soured her view of Oxford forever — her papers were pointedly left to Cambridge — sentimentality was never something that greatly troubled the Iron Lady.

For a woman who had studied under the Nobel Prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin, an honorary degree counted for little compared with what Oxford University ultimately gave the Prime Minister in-the-making — and this week Oxford, and Somerville in particular — can celebrate that.