"Spot the Leftie" howled the Sun's headline last week above a photograph of the House of Commons showing Tory benches crammed with Conservatives jostling to deliver identikit encomia after Thatcher's death, and opposition benches devoid of mourners. How. Very. Dare. They. Such was the Sun's subtext.Yes, lefty is back as a term of abuse after decades in abeyance. What next? The GLC? Red Ken in a safari suit? Scargill arrested double quick by Met cops on double time – ideally to a soundtrack of the Human League's Don't You Want Me?

True, the term was used last summer by Conservative MP Aidan Burley who tweeted Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony was "Leftie cultural crap". But lefty has now become the slur du jour for anyone who expresses anything about the death of Margaret Thatcher other than eulogy.

Glenn Greenwald astutely wrote in the Guardian last week that the dictate that one 'not speak ill of the dead' is appropriate for private individuals, not influential public figures.

"Leftie" this week means those who won't accept that dictate. For the right it may be a slur, for the left, badge of honour . True, "leftie" lumps together the principled with the toxic misogynists who forget to think before they sprayed. Those triumphalist "the bitch is dead" banners took me back to the eighties, too, when to be a leftie was to feel queasy about what some of the men ostensibly in your ranks thought they could say about a womanWhat's odd about the current lefty baiting, though, is that left and right have switched places. It's old lefties like Ken Loach who call for the frontiers of the state to be rolled back, while Thatcherite lackeys in the tabloid press (I've waited 23 years to dust that one off) call for taxpayers' money to be lavished on the Iron Lady's funeral.

"How should we honour her?" asked Loach. "Let's privatise her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It's what she would have wanted." That was too much for the Mail, which launched a petition to be signed by that paradoxical demographic, Thatcherite statists, calling for a publicly funded funeral. Spot the lefty? Spot the Thatcherite? It's hard to do either when history is replayed as farce.

In fact, despite the Sun's imposture of a headline, it isn't hard to spot the lefties. Here they are now, coming up from under the floorboards, like rats returning to a righted ship – the miners' wives, scruffy comedians, evil Steve Bell, nasty Derek Hatton, a "community drama teacher". "Crawling out of the woodwork, the old lefties spewing bile about Lady Thatcher," went the Mail's superb mixed metaphor of a headline.

Is it really lefty community-drama teachers we need to hear from at this diffiicult time? The Daily Telegraph thought so. "Woman behind street parties to 'celebrate' death of Margaret Thatcher named" went their headline.

Now I bow to no Telegraph hack in my aversion to Facebook-organised flash parties, but Romany Blythe's evite (admittedly under the woeful heading The Witch Is Dead) at least had an authentic, deluded leftie vibe that took me right back to when Mrs T was in her pomp. "Come and celebrate our liberty and freedom from tyranny," she urged. Get a grip, woman. With Cameron and Osborne in Downing Street and Boris waiting in the wings? There's nothing to celebrate in 2013, especially for lefties.