Lady Thatcher left instructions that the chancellor and vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, together with two alumni, be invited to her funeral, which is being held today in London.

She presided over Buckingham¡¯s official opening as a university college in 1976 (it became a university in 1983, the first in the UK independent of state funding) and served as its chancellor between 1992 and 1998.

Terence Kealey, the Buckingham vice-chancellor, will attend the funeral alongside the university¡¯s chancellor, Lord Tanlaw, and alumni Flora Fairbairn and Daniel Bakpa.

Professor Kealey said: ¡°I felt very sad to learn of her death. I knew that she never forgot the way that she lost office and the injustice that she felt about it because I shared her opinion.

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¡°I thought that she was a truly great prime minister, one of the four greatest of the 20^th Century, and I thought she was always kinder and more vulnerable than people understood because her determination to succeed on behalf of the nation forced her into a more confrontational approach than was true to her character.

¡°She transformed the nation wholly for the better and, though of course she made mistakes (who doesn¡¯t?), she deserved better than to have been so brutally ejected by others.¡±

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Lady Thatcher gave an insight into her views on higher education in a speech at a Buckingham graduation ceremony in 1993.

¡°This is a very special university,¡± she said. ¡°Looking back on the history of this remarkable country whose influence girded the globe, it is astonishing that it had no independent university.

¡°And yet those English and Scottish people who left our shores to build America, taking with them the sturdy values of effort, independence, thrift, freedom, justice, self-government, and a sense of obligation to one to another ¨C they started private universities and colleges, many of them. Of course they didn¡¯t go to America for subsidies ¨C there weren¡¯t any.¡±

She added that ¡°like the builders of the New World¡±, the founders of Buckingham ¡°didn¡¯t want government interfering too much so they went ahead on their own¡±.

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john.morgan@tsleducation.com