There’s a famous Frost Report sketch in which upper-class John Cleese looks down on middle-class Ronnie Barker who, in turn, peers down at working-class Ronnie Corbett, who does, of course, know his place.

That was the shape of society in 1966, four years before I was born. In late 1987, just as I was coming up to my 18th birthday and able to vote for the first time, Margaret Thatcher told us that there was no such thing as society anyway.

Then, last week, the BBC drew up a new society map of Britain, identifying seven distinct social classes. Who knows whether Thatcher saw that and what she thought of it, but perhaps it was one of the final validations of her policies and beliefs she received before she died on Monday. If society was clinging on to its own existence, despite Thatcher’s best efforts, then at least it had become splintered and dispersed beyond all former recognition.

I never met Thatcher, but I’m pretty sure I hated her. I hated her policies and I don’t think she was the sort of person who could be separated from her ideology. But I didn’t feel any major cause for celebration when she died. I merely felt sad, that so long after she had lost power, we are still so mired in the peevish, petty, small-minded world she ushered in.

Thatcher would have liked the parties celebrating her passing, I think, because that’s the sort of place she made of Britain – a divided, antagonistic, them-and-us place. At the beating heart of Thatcherism is the idea that somewhere there is a foe, an enemy that needs defeating, or at the very least defending against. Because nothing focuses a nation like antagonism.

Thatcher killed the manufacturing industries, effectively setting the suddenly penuried north against the more affluent south, less dependent on coal and steel. She set the bosses against the unions. She set children whose families could afford the nutritional benefits of milk against those who had always relied on their daily school bottle. Such a small thing, a bottle of milk for a child. Such a divisive act, to take it away.

She even set the police – public servants, remember, for the protection of the society she so dismissed – against the people. I can’t forget those TV images of riot police storming the lines of miners protesting the sudden and cruel axing of their livelihood.

Britain vs Europe. Britain vs Argentina. Britain standing shoulder to shoulder with America against the Soviet Union, while we all spent the 80s waiting for nuclear missiles to rain death on us.

And today, what do we have? A coalition government that no-one actually voted for, made up of the entitled and the privileged who have no empathy with the people they are squeezing dry.

This, then, is Thatcher’s legacy. A fractured society where you have to constantly pick sides. I know my place. Do you?