The result is that Italy now has a Leftist government, but the intellectuals are no longer in the position of underdogs out of government. So there is no government scrutiny to speak of, and no political debate at all.

Democracy and political debate are best served when intellectualism belongs to both Left and Right, both people in government and out of government. Listen to any of the mainstream British commentators. Even the lifelong Tories can tear the present government to shreds if they have to.

This, with a few slight differences, is one of the problems facing the opposition parties in Malta. It is always Labour that had the monopoly on intellectualism. What the governing party had – the PN, as it happens – was a sort of detached bourgeois conversation de salon. Think of Peter Serracino Inglott’s coma-inducing monologues at AZAD “debates”. They never raged and fumed.

Even now, they struggle to express any kind of emotion, so it all comes out sounding like the platitudes of the comfortably numb.

Douglas Murray uses the F-word on national television in sentences that sound like clippings from The Economist. That’s the sort of men and women that Malta needs.

Not very courteous of him to choose Malta then. Plenty of larger, safer, better places where his enemies can’t blend in. Switzerland or the French Riviera, the Scottish Highlands.

That only works if you’re of the hip and trendy Left, and therefore mocking but never getting angry, because in the end you’re a snob.

The Nationalist media need to be Douglas Murray, not some Bobo Italian poser.