Following Keir Starmer’s resignation yesterday, the Andy Burnham bandwagon now seems unstoppable. But does Labour have the wit not to waste its momentum?

If Burnham’s bid for the leadership goes unchallenged, he could become prime minister within a month. Conveniently, Parliament will be in recess from 17 July. That would give Labour until the end of August to prepare a knockout blow: an early autumn general election.

As well as providing the new PM with a personal mandate, a snap election would wrongfoot the opposition parties. There’d be no time for the usual midterm makeover — and they all desperately need one: Reform UK to recover its lost momentum, the Greens to adapt to a re-energized Labour Party, and the Lib Dems to replace their irrelevant leader. As for the Conservatives, they need to work out why Kemi Badenoch’s growing popularity isn’t translating into higher poll ratings for the party.

The Tories have the most to lose from an early election, yet their strategy for fighting one is coming into focus. Earlier this month, Badenoch ruled out any sort of deal with Reform: “I’m just saying no. It’s just no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” If that wasn’t emphatic enough, she was at it again this weekend in an op-ed for the Mail on Sunday. Referring to last week’s by-elections in Makerfield and Aberdeen South, she declared that “the results have left the idea of the Conservatives doing a deal with Reform stone-dead.”

This escalating hostility towards Nigel Farage’s party might seem an odd priority at a time of Labour upheaval. But with a snap election in the air, the Tories have to defend their remaining seats — in most cases, from Reform.

Tory strategists are pinning their hopes for saving those seats on receiving support from Left-leaning voters. There’s polling evidence to show that Conservative candidates in Tory/Reform marginals could benefit from significant anti-Reform tactical voting. So while a snap election is not to the Tories’ advantage, a theme of “Stop Farage” would be.

Of course, this strategy is one of survival rather than revival. But if there’s no time to fundamentally change public opinion about the Conservative Party, this is arguably the least worst option. Certainly, there’s little sign of dissent within the Tory ranks.

That, however, could change. While the Labour Party will position itself as the only way to stop Farage, it could emphasize a unite-the-Left strategy of the sort that enabled Jeremy Corbyn to win a 40% vote share in 2017. Burnham is unlikely to match that, but in a fractured party system he doesn’t have to. In fact, he could win a majority and a mandate for a Left-of-Starmer government with about a third of the vote.

The closer Britain comes to that scenario, the greater the pressure that both Badenoch and Farage will come under to unite the Right in response. Significantly, there was a hint of an olive branch in the Reform leader’s statement after the by-elections. He conceded that “the Conservatives will have their pockets of strength around the country”, a tacit admission that his party’s kill-the-Tories strategy has failed.

For the moment, Badenoch is in no mood to reciprocate. But if the Burnham bandwagon rumbles on, the demand for an equal and opposite force will become irresistible.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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