TWENTY-SIX years ago, Margret Thatcher set off on her famous Walk in the Wilderness on Teesside, where she was confronted by an angry man demanding answers.

Shoving a folder containing more than 1,000 letters of rejection under her nose, he demanded to know: “Where are the jobs?”

Eric Fletcher was then 35.

Now 60, he lives with his second wife in nearby Grangetown and remembers the day well.

“I got a call from a friend, who knew I’d been looking for work, and he said, ‘Do you know Thatcher’s coming here this afternoon?’ I said I didn’t, but I grabbed my folder and went down to see her.

“She was a very arrogant woman at the time. She didn’t want to know me. All the people were there cheering her, she was more than happy to talk to them, but she didn’t want anything to do with me.

“I asked her about the jobs, and all she said was ‘retrain, young man’. I started to explain that I didn’t know about computers, that I couldn’t get a job like that, but she just turned her back on me and walked away.”

Mr Fletcher did receive a letter the next day from the job centre, asking him to go down and talk to them about a job, but he does not thank Mrs Thatcher.

“It was done to keep me quiet, that’s what I think. I did get a job at Billingham Press not long after that, but that was down to my hard work.”

Starting as a manual labourer, he has worked for the company for the past 25 years, eventually becoming a binder, without ever having to retrain.

But, despite his run-in with the Iron Lady, he says he did feel sorry for her family after hearing about her death. He said: “I do respect her and what she did. There have been some nasty things put on Facebook about her and I don’t agree with that.

“She was a strong woman, and she did some very good things for the country, just not for the working classes – and not for people like me.”

Ever since that fateful day more than two decades ago, Mr Fletcher’s life has been linked with Mrs Thatcher.

After her death was announced on the news, he got a call from his brother, asking if he was going to the funeral.

“Strangely enough I haven’t been invited,” he said. “But I wouldn’t go, even if I was.”