“She never backed down even when the fight was hard.” Speaking in Rome on Saturday, British prime minister Rishi Sunak evoked his predecessor Margaret Thatcher — while also flattering his host Giorgia Meloni by comparing her to his Tory heroine. Sunak suggested that the Italian premier was applying a Thatcherite legacy to new challenges: for today “we have to apply Thatcher’s radicalism to illegal immigration.”

Many commentators highlighted the warm relations between the pair, with Sunak’s appearance at the meetup held by Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party “returning the favor” for her attending his otherwise widely deserted artificial intelligence summit in London. Where three years ago a Tory MP was reprimanded for featuring at a far-right gathering in Rome with similar speakers, today Sunak embraces Meloni as a like-minded conservative.

Sunak is no outlier in this regard: while Meloni’s party has a fascist heritage and promotes “Great Replacement Theory,” its commitment to Euro-Atlantic institutions has acquired it a stable place in the EU center right, ever closer to the Christian democratic European People’s Party. The “radicalism” evoked by Sunak is now mainstream. When Meloni visited London in April, Sunak’s team even sought her endorsement of his plan to send rejected asylum seekers to Rwanda, regardless of their country of origin. She obliged, even claiming that the word “deportation” simply doesn’t apply to the removal of migrants who arrived illegally.