THE LONG READ: The evil genius behind the migrant crisis

It is a sunny morning on Sicily’s east coast and Mount Etna is a postcard, rising from a green-blue sea up through olive groves, orange orchards and steep hill towns to ascend a towering snowy cone ringed by cotton-wool clouds.

But in the centre of this Mediterranean tableau, at the end of a long quay in the port of Augusta, is an anomaly: a monstrous dull, grey Italian gunboat, on whose rear-deck 447 people are huddling under heavy brown blankets.

At the guardrail is a man, in his mid-30s, with a wild beard and a baby on his hip. Beside him is a woman in an abaya, who is holding the hand of a small girl in pigtails with a grubby pink rucksack on her back.