AN UNEXPECTED “guest” arrived at Durham Miners’ Gala on Saturday — the rotting remains of Margaret Thatcher in a coffin.

And the coffin will be wheeled out — literally, it is on wheels — at future galas as a reminder of the lasting hatred felt towards the woman responsible for the destruction of Britain’s deep-mined coal industry.

The coffin was made by ex-miner Mick Woods, who worked at South Yorkshire’s Manvers Main colliery which was shut by the Tories in 1988. Later he worked at Kellingley in Yorkshire, Britain’s last operating pit.

Mick was involved in organising the funeral pyre lit at Goldthorpe in South Yorkshire on the day of Thatcher’s funeral, April 17 2013.

He’s proud of that.

“Film of that went around the world,” he said.

But he wanted to create a more permanent “memorial” to the Tory PM, so he built an open-topped coffin containing an effigy of her, gruesomely rotting away.

He mounted one end of the coffin on wheels so that it can be pushed around wheelbarrow-style.

The coffin bears words such as “scab” and “milk snatcher” — Thatcher abolished free school milk as education secretary under Edward Heath.

On Saturday it was in the front rank of the thousands-strong audience before the speakers’ platform in the gala field.

It was Mick’s first Durham Miners’ Gala.

“I wanted to make a derogatory comment dragging her down to the bowels of hell,” he said, as ex-miners queued to be photographed with the coffin.

“I’ll be back with it next year.”