Photograph: Marc Turner

North Korea could learn a thing or two from the Daily Mail. The newspaper’s regime maintains its discipline at all times. No sooner had a few possibly intoxicated youngsters decided to hold a minute’s celebratory pandemonium in a few public areas than photographs were obtained and the party line was ready for broadcast. Some of it was positively Churchillian.

Stephen Glover, who harrumphs for England, wrote: “Never in modern times, and probably not in the entire history of these islands, has the demise of a public figure been greeted with such euphoria and wild expressions of hate. The death of Margaret Thatcher has revealed something very unpleasant, and rather unexpected, about our country.”

Glover dug out his pocket Latin dictionary to demonstrate that being rude to the expired is a modern phenomenon and therefore, by definition, evil. “De mortuis nil nisi bonum”, typed the Cicero of the commuting classes. Roughtly: “Of the dead nothing unless it is good.”

As an argument, it was equivalent to: “Say what you like about Pinochet, but he was good to his mother.” It was also a straightforward demand. Anyone who judged the deceased to have been contemptible, callous, wantonly destructive, a catastrophe for the body politic or just off her head had better shut up.

Glover was especially galled by the behaviour of “many young people who are not obviously politicised and often (to judge by radio and TV interviews) know almost nothing about the woman they detest. They have been told ( by teachers? by parents?) that Lady Thatcher was evil, and that seems to be enough for them to celebrate her death.”

At the risk of granting the oxygen of publicity, let’s take this peroration seriously. It goes to the heart of what has been said by Conservative Britain since Thatcher joined the Choir Invisible. They have insisted, time and again, that she made the country what it is today. They have said that we are, each of us, the inheritors of her legacy, the young above all. Economically, politically and socially, ours is the world she made. That’s the claim.

SO put yourself in the position of a younger person. Look around, what do you see? Youth unemployment is creeping towards one million again. The coalition has decided that neither word in the phrase “social security” can survive. The economy is feeding the fishes because a trillion pounds had to be found to cover bets made by poorly-regulated banks.

So who “deregulated” financial services in Britain in October 1986? Whose big bang – still leaking fallout – was that, setting off chain reactions in investment banking, credit markets and housing? The youngsters with their amusing “death parties” don’t need to know every footnote to the history. All they need to know is what they are told. They are living in Thatcher’s Britain, says the Daily Mail. Is the abbreviation LOL still in use?

“There is no alternative” – that was one of hers. By a positively supernatural coincidence, it happens to be the message the coalition wishes to convey at this very moment. Thatcher’s metabolic functions might have become history, she might be off the twig, but she still has her uses. So too do groups of young people getting off their faces. As an enemy within, as far as the Tory claque is concerned, they’ll do.

What is most interesting about the attempt to demonise anyone who refuses to celebrate a misspent life is the implied warning. The coalition’s next move, it seems clear, will be to present itself as Thatcherism reborn, grasping the baton, picking up the fallen standard, doing what has to be done because that’s what the cult’s leader would have wanted. What is faintly chilling – or faintly comical – is the assumption that we’ll fall for it.

Who buys a dead parrot? Some of those who took the opportunity to express themselves when the Finchley Blue decided to rest in peace said they were not in the market. Perhaps that is what got under pallid skins at the Mail. Perhaps, equally, their op- ed writers cannot sleep easily without haunted dreams of barbarians at the gate. It is a strange land they mistake for Britain.

If Cameron and his colleagues are treating the cessation of an old person’s life as a godsend, they are just a little desperate. If their friends in the right- wing papers are truly outraged by a few people exercising the democratic right to pass an opinion it means they have guessed the truth. They adored the reactionary fool; others – but how many others? – did not.

Still, Glover’s bit of Latin jogged a memory. Plautus wrote plays and came up with the character of the clever slave, wiser than his masters. Plautus had a snappy line. It suggests that “hominum immortalis est infamia; etum tum vivit, cum esse credas mortuam”. To wit: “disgrace is immortal, and it lives even when one thinks it dead”.

Frankie Boyle, who doesn’t always make me laugh, was funnier on the Twitter thing. “Finally, I get to wear my black suit and tap shoes together,” he wrote. Now he can party like it isn’t 1979.