So how was it as theatre? Everyone agrees that Thatcher's funeral, long planned and briefly rehearsed, was immaculate in the precision of its choreography: everything was timed to such perfection that the coffin even emerged from the west door of St Paul's Cathedral exactly on the stroke of noon.
But, while the physical presentation was flawless, I felt a strange disproportion between the ceremonial grandeur of the occasion and the contentious politics of Thatcher herself. The bishop of London, in his address, sought to make a distinction between the "ism" and the individual; but if ever there was any one person in whom they were totally inseparable, I would have thought it was Margaret Thatcher.
The giveway came in David Dimbleby's invocation, at different times in his BBC commentary, of the funerals of Nelson, Wellington and Churchill. I missed the first two of those but I certainly remember Churchill's funeral: a truly solemn event in which we felt we were marking not just the death of a political leader but a turning point in the national story.
Patrick O'Donovan, in a much-quoted Observer piece, remarked that, as Churchill's coffin passed through the London streets it was "surrounded by this extraordinary silence, not of grief but of respect". In contrast, the Thatcher hearse was met with ripples of polite applause from her well-wishers. I felt I was watching an attempt to write her into the national myth rather than, as with Churchill, a piece of genuine theatre.
As with all such events, the drama lay in the detail. Thanks to the cameras, it was possible to glimpse all sorts of revealingly human moments: the sweat on the brow of a pallbearer after piloting the coffin up the steps of St Paul's; the sudden, muttered aside of the Queen to the Duke of Edinburgh as the coffin itself passed by; the concentration on the face of a boy-treble as the choir sang the anthem from the Fauré Requiem.
The camerawork throughout was astonishing, with pans round the dome of St Paul's seeming to echo the tessellated circle in which the coffin was placed. But, fascinating as it was to catch momentary close-ups of Thatcher's former colleagues such as Carrington, Heseltine, Tebbit and Hurd, I was suddenly reminded of the old, and today much less justified, joke about the Church of England being "the Tory party at prayer."
Was I moved? Very rarely. But that was because I felt I was vicariously witnessing not one of those rare moments when the British achieve a sense of national identity but the well-staged funeral of a combative ideologue. If anything did touch me it was the bishop's articulation of the idea that death is an entrance rather than an exit, which he reinforced by quoting TS Eliot's line that "the end is where we start from".
Even then, since all the spectacular pomp of the funeral seemed designed to propagate the Thatcher myth, I was reminded of an even more pungent phrase from Eliot's Four Quartets: "human kind cannot bear very much reality".
