Surely, I suggested, she would have been much more conflicted than that. Thatcher was for free markets, economic openness and technological change, yet she was also deeply interested in the integrity of the nation state and its borders. Two of her deepest instincts were in direct conflict, one eroding the other.

Of course, the upsides of the shrinking of the world, thanks to improved transport, better communications, the integration of financial markets and the liberalisation of trade, have been tremendous. Take a country such as India, whose people existed on a diet of socialism and central planning in the decades after independence. The economy grew at an average of 3 per cent in the 1960s and 3 per cent in the 1970s. After the liberalisation of the early 1990s, growth rates climbed. In the 2000s, even including the years of the global downturn that followed the financial crisis, India's average growth rate was 7.8 per cent.

The result is an expansion of the Indian middle class, a phenomenon replicated and exceeded in other fast-growing economies. EY, the professional services firm, estimates that the middle class in India — now in the region of 50 million — will grow to 200 million by 2020 and 475 million by 2030. It is estimated that around one billion Chinese will be middle class by 2030. Globalisation is working.

There have also been benefits for the older-established economies, not least in the downward pressure on prices paid by consumers in the West, because of the flood of cheaper goods from these newly-liberated economies.

And liberalisation and globalisation have had a remarkable impact in some previously stricken European countries too. A quarter of a century ago, Poland was only beginning its recovery from Communism. In recent years, it has had one of the best growth records in Europe. As the financial writer Matthew Lynn put it recently: "Poland got some big things right. It privatised its industries very quickly, restoring free and competitive markets. It limited taxes. It limited debt. Government wages were capped. And it has steadily climbed the tables for free, competitive economies."

Poland also joined the EU and became an open trading economy, which meant that it could export labour. The Poles were free to come to the UK and many did so. By 2011, at the time of the last census, 1.2 million Poles had been issued with UK national insurance numbers. These new arrivals were joined later by youngsters from Spain and Italy seeking refuge from the eurozone crisis, and from migrants from outside the EU. In the age of globalisation, migration to the UK has boomed. 

Though British voters enjoy some of the practical benefits it brings, immigration makes many of them deeply uneasy. Farage has capitalised on such fears skilfully. He has refined the position developed by Mrs Thatcher towards the end of her premiership, added populist rhetoric and turned it into a powerful message that appeals to several million Britons. We are a nation of traders. Let's have free trade in goods, services and finance with the outside world, he says, free of the interference of the EU. But let's not have the transcontinental migration and influx of people that accompanies economic openness.

For this, the elite — which tends to approve of all aspects of globalisation, almost without reservation — dismisses Farage as a Little Englander trying to pull up the drawbridge, even though the rise of parties representing voters worried about these themes is not an exclusively English or British phenomenon.