Mark Steyn guts the mainstream EU

Signor Conte heads what would once have been regarded as a pantomime-horse coalition of two rear ends: the left-wing Five Star Movement (M5S) and the right-wing Northern League (Lega). The so-called GroKo - the Christian Democrat/Social Democrat "Große Koalition" that governed Germany for most of the last thirteen years - was regarded as an alliance of all the prudent, sensible, mainstream persons, the kind who think nothing of admitting one-and-a-half million poorly educated, largely unemployable, demographically transformative young Muslim men into a country and then wondering why the gang-rape statistics are through the roof. By contrast, the Italian government is a coalition of the non-prudent non-sensible non-mainstream - the "alt-left" and the "far-right". So how can that possibly work?

Well, we're about to find out. In the two weeks he's been in office, the new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini (leader of the Lega) has talked non-stop about migrants and his plans to deport over half-a-million of them: "The good times for illegals are over," he declares confidently. "Get ready to pack your bags." On election day, his party won 17 per cent of the vote; after a fortnight of deportation talk, he's up to 27 per cent. Having talked the talk, he's now walking the walk: For the first time since the "humanitarian crisis" began five years ago, the Italian government has closed its ports to a migrant vessel: The MV Aquarius, operated by SOS Mediterranée and Médecins Sans Frontières, was refused permission to dock in Sicily, and told to push off and find somewhere else.

What could be more heartwarming than an NGO rescue ship named after a song from Hair? Since February 2016 it's been cruising the waters of the southern Med off the coast of Libya waiting for some ramshackle "refugee" craft to sink in front of it, and then scooping up the migrants and delivering them to Italy.