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The early and middle part of the 20th century had been kind to the town, and its football team – along with Manchester United’s ‘Busby Babes’ – were the best in the land. Captained by legendary centre-half Billy Wright, Wolverhampton Wanderers won three league championships in the 1950s and an FA Cup at the end of the decade, making them the unofficial world club champions.

But the mid- to late-1960s saw a painful decline in both Wolverhampton’s – and the industrial western heartland’s – economic fortunes, and by the mid-1970s a third of the population lived in council housing, with unemployment rising and immigration causing deep divisions in the West Midlands.

Enoch Powell, author of the infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, was the local MP for Wolverhampton South West. I’ll never forget as a very young boy answering the door to him while he was on the stump in the first general election campaign of 1974. I remember opening the door to the palest-looking man I’d ever seen, his skin like alabaster, head slightly tilted forward. He stared at me intensely with fixed, unblinking eyes.