AS WE were saying ten years ago, only history will show what we should make of Mrs Hacksaw. That playful, rasping nickname was how this column used to refer to Margaret Thatcher, as readers with long memories may recall.

Can it really be a whole decade since Mrs Thatcher took her handbag home and resigned after the Conservative Party turned on her? Indeed it is, the anniversary fell yesterday.

The end, when it came, was first announced in a news flash from the Press Association: "Thatcher to resign as Prime Minister. Official. End."

You wouldn't have thought that eight words could say so much.

There were a number of reactions to Thatcher's demise, but generally these fell into two categories: shocked sorrow and unrestrained, air-punching glee. My own response tended towards gleefully malicious, cart-wheeling joy - but Mrs Thatcher always did bring out the worst in me.

On the day after the great handbagger herself was handbagged, this column wondered what history would make of Mrs Thatcher, and hoped that "the history books will not forget to recall the dogma, the narrow-mindedness, the tatty schools, the struggling health service, the neglected transport system, the stupid insistence on the will of the free market".

Columns tend to be snapshots, written in the blink of history's eye. A few blinks later and everything has changed. And a whole blinking decade later, it might be possible to wonder what you were on at the time. Except that, come to think of it, I still stand by every word.

This late in the day, there is little point in going over the Thatcher era. It is interesting, though, to go on a ghost hunt and see how the spectral handbag haunts the politics of today.

There are many ways in which the spirit of Mrs Thatcher still rattles about the rafters of our political life.

It is easy to argue that the Conservative Party of today is more completely her creation than that of the more tolerant Major years. William Hague, once her spotty young Yorkshire protg, now leads a Tory party that is made in her intolerant image, small-minded, Europe-baiting, xenophobic and - a departure, this - crudely opportunistic.

Whatever you thought of Mrs Thatcher, she was not a gadfly opportunist, being possessed by absolute purpose, or at least giving that steely impression. She had the zealot's glint and a gift for defining policies, such as privatisation or the give-away sale of council houses.

William Hague lacks any such clear political theory - and, more interestingly, so too does Tony Blair. For if it is all too easy to berate the modern Tories for being cast in Mrs Thatcher's mean mould, it is more fruitful to consider just how much she has shaped her old foes now known as New Labour.

If Old Labour was haunted by Mrs Thatcher in the flesh, New Labour was created to lay her ghost.

Mrs Thatcher was almost the architect of New Labour, because the party was re-shaped and re-packaged in reaction to her long success and all the defeats she inflicted on Old Labour.

To this day, New Labour remains psychologically damaged by Thatcherism. Almost everything the party does might be said to be in response to what she did to Old Labour.

A long memory can be an asset, but it can also be a handicap. This far away, it is time for Labour to boldly have its own vision, rather than stubbornly sticking to such perverse Thatcherite notions as, for example, privatising air traffic control.

Mrs Thatcher's creed - public bad, private good - was only one way of looking at the world.

Ten years on, Labour should get on with life today and forget about the batty ghost who still haunts the far right wing of the political mansion.