Your editorial (The Guardian view on Giorgia Meloni: normalising the radical right, 23 April) correctly exposed the danger that Giorgia Meloni and her party with neofascist roots poses to core European ideals and values. But you are wrong in seeing Rishi Sunak’s flirtation as anything new for Britain’s Tories.
In 2019, after the European elections, Britain’s Tory MEPs were happy to leap into bed with the Brothers of Italy in their European Conservatives and Reformists Group. Sunak is demonstrating Tory continuity, not change.
Glyn Ford
Labour MEP (1984-2009); rapporteur for the European parliament’s Committee of Inquiry into Growth of Fascism and Racism in Europe (1985)
• Giorgia Meloni is at the beginning of her attempt to move her rightwing coalition into mainstream European conservatism. In the UK, we are 13 years into a project that is doing the opposite. The UK is where Meloni wants to be, but the stumbling block is that Italians have seen what Brexit has done, prompting greater support of the EU among them. Meloni can therefore only be as rightwing as her membership will fund and allow at the moment.
But the Tories have 13 years’ experience of moving a country to the far right, with its rhetoric and culture wars, and away from Europe. Italy has the same ingredients we had: a leftwards move by the main leftwing party (the Partito Democratico), continuing austerity, and migration ripe for exploitation. Rishi Sunak may just give her the insight of how to politically morph from David Cameron to him.
John Cooke
Needham Market, Suffolk
• Giorgia Meloni “normalising the radical right”? The Tory party’s been doing that for years.
Rib Davis
Leyton, London
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