Keir Starmer will be under no illusions at the level of discomfort some in his party may have felt at the sight of their leader smiling and joking with Giorgia Meloni as they strolled through the gardens of the Villa Doria Pamphili on his trip to Rome on Monday.
The Italian prime minister’s brand of hard-right populism is far out of the comfort zone of many Labour MPs, and even though she governs, for the most part, from the centre-right, they are unable to shrug off her party’s neo-fascist roots.
