For a long time they were known as "the devil's decade", "the locust years", when unemployment shot through the roof, fascism gathered momentum abroad and the political classes betrayed the hopes of a generation.

Nonetheless, argues Macleod, "it is not at Munich but at the locust years, 1934 and 1935, that the finger of criticism should be pointed."

Yet he became enmeshed in the red-state-vs.-blue-state, hot-button, wedge-issue, 50%-plus-one formula that has dominated and degraded our politics in these locust years of racial, regional and cultural polarization.