It would thrust the Tories into a head-on clash with the unholy alliance that has sprung up between those for whom national borders are barriers to profit and no borders-advocates for whom they are the root of all evil. It is this alliance of convenience between enemies that drives demand for mass immigration.
That would mean taking the side of the little guy against big business and the banks. Would the Tories have the bottle?
Such a shift in mind-set might require moving away from small government free market Thatcherism which has been their default mantra for half a century and towards dirigiste big government (actually something of which Boris Johnson was rather fond).
But just how rocky the road to recovery will be for the Tories, if they were to choose to copy Giorgia Meloni, can be seen by the way she is so relentlessly denigrated by the global media.
They continue to call Meloni “far-Right”, though that description is false for several reasons. To start with, being far-Right in Italy, however incredible this might seem, is a vote loser. The Italians are not a nation of fascists straining at the leash to come out of the closet. Genuine far-Right parties here get virtually no votes. The main one, Forza Nuova, could not even muster the required 36,000 signatures to field candidates at the 2022 general election.
For the record, Giorgia Meloni began to call herself a conservative in 2012 when she was one of the co-founders of Fratelli d’Italia as a conservative party. Yes, she and many of them had in the past been members of Italy’s post-fascist party, hence the “heir to Mussolini” tag. But in 1995 that party had rejected fascism and renounced the evil that it had done, and in 2009 merged with Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right party, then called Popolo della Libertà.
Naturally, no one ever calls Italy’s main Left-wing party – the Partito Democratico (PD) – or its leader Elly Schlein – ‘far-Left’, let alone the heirs to Stalin. But the PD’s connection with Italian Communism is far more direct than that of Meloni’s party with Italian fascism. While Meloni was only in the post-fascist party, not the Partito Fascista Repubblicano which was abolished in 1945, there are plenty of people in the PD today who were in the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI).
The PCI, which was the largest in the Western world, was dissolved only in 1991 when all hope was lost and the PD is its direct descendant. Its first post-war leader, Palmiero Togliatti, had spent the Second World War in Moscow as a member of the Soviet Politburo, and was known as Stalin’s Italian.
When I interviewed Meloni during the 2022 election campaign she told me that she is inspired by English Tories such as Roger Scruton and J.R.R Tolkien, her favourite author. Scruton in particular regarded the paternalistic state, the family and the community as forces for good and felt too much emphasis on the market dangerous. He was no pure Thatcherite. Hence his appeal to Meloni.
In power, the closest Meloni has come to a far-Right policy is in her efforts to stop illegal migrant boats from North Africa. Last November, for instance, she struck a deal with Albanian Socialist Prime Minister Eddy Rama last November to off-shore to Albania up to 36,000 migrants a year where they will be detained while their asylum applications are being processed. Due to launch in August, it is far more practical than Sunak’s Rwanda scheme announced more than two years ago and still not off the ground because it is far less prone to human rights violation challenges.
But if her Albania scheme makes Meloni ‘far-Right’ then it makes lots of centrists ‘far-Right’ as well, such as EU President Ursula von der Leyen who has praised it as “out of the box thinking” and ensured that the EPP – her centre-right group in the European Parliament – included it as a pledge in their recent election manifesto. The same goes for 15 EU governments who in May wrote to the EU Commission urging it to adopt a similar scheme for the whole bloc.
To me that looks like von der Leyen, the EPP and the 15 EU governments moving to the Right thanks to Meloni. Not vice versa. But they don’t get called populists!
Nicholas Farrell has lived in Italy for 25 years and is author of ‘Mussolini A New Life’