Following talks on a migration crackdown with Hungary’s Viktor Orban at the European Political Community summit this week, host Keir Starmer allowed himself a rare unguarded moment as he told Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni about his efforts to bring his Labour lawmakers along on his policies.
"These were hard conversations to have with my party,” Britain’s new center-left prime minister, fresh off a landslide U.K. election victory two weeks ago, said to his right-wing counterpart as they walked through the maze in Blenheim Palace. "Yeah, I imagine,” she smiled back.
The pair are unlikely allies, and it was odder still to see Starmer — a former human rights lawyer — appearing to enjoy Orban’s jokes. Yet for allies of the prime minister, there are lessons to be learned from both leaders — and Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the U.S. — about what some senior Labour officials see as the key threat to their administration: the surge of the populist right across Europe and America, and the fear that it could be replicated in the U.K.