Hooray for the Guardian and the cartooists Steve Bell & Martin Rowson say I.
The cartoonists in particular are performing the necessary role/function of Court Jester puncturing the wall of right-wing "conservative" poltical correctness associated with this event. Describing the grotesque nature of it all and how the "emperor" and all of his/her slavishly dutiful acolytes really do not have any clothes.

Phil Matimein

It’s extremely rare for any party in a UK general election to get an outright majority of votes – no government since the 19th century has done that. Even the Labour landslide of 1945 secured only 48.1% of the vote. Occasionally a government has won more seats than the second-placed party with fewer votes, but it’s pretty rare (Conservatives in 1951, Labour in 1974). Thatcher won all her elections as PM, though you're right, she never won an outright majority.

In general I agree with Philip that the tendency in recent years is for party leaders to be hated far more than their records deserve. This seems to be the case in Australia as well as the UK and the USA. Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes, Cameron and Blair, Keating, Howard and Gillard have been detested in a way that seems visceral and mindless, out of proportion to their faults, which are admittedly many.

I also agree that genuine and interesting leaders are likely to be controversial and divisive – Churchill, Hawke and Keating, and Howard (for all his “relaxed and comfortable” ambitions) put people’s backs up because they tried to change things, and succeeded.

Thatcher, though, I think is an exception. I lived in the UK for most of the Thatcher years. She deserved to be loathed, not because she was divisive (though she was), but because she was a vindictive practitioner of class war who deliberately destroyed sections of British industry and the communities that relied on them. She instituted a new and even more ugly brand of crony capitalism in place of the comfortable elitism of the British establishment (who loathed her almost as much as the left), and virtually gave away public assets to buy votes. She took the country into a war that would have been unnecessary if the Foreign Office and security forces were half competent, fuelling militaristic populist sentiment to boost her position from the most unpopular post-war Prime Minister to a comfortable election win in 1982.