Yesterday’s speech by Tom Tugendhat was strange. Was it a leadership launch? Not officially, although it was his first major speech of the Tory leadership campaign; there was only one topic (the riots) and no roller banners, logos or the other assorted paraphernalia of a campaign.

Was it then an official speech in his capacity as Shadow Security Minister? Again, apparently not. His team said it was his view as Shadow Security Manager, a formulation which has a distinctly ‘assistant to the regional manager‘ vibe.

Nonetheless, it was good leadership material: the UK needs to crack down on inconsistent strategies that look like two-tier policing, and be much more vigorous in policing public disorder. He also announced that he wants to set up a new national security police force with functions taken out of the Met (although despite the setting this would not, apparently, include public order).

It highlights the challenge Tugendhat faces: as the clear front-runner among the One Nation candidates in the contest, he should have a fairly clear path to the final two. But the traditional role of his faction in the final round is losing.

Thus, he needs to find ways to offer Conservative members what they want without either coming across as insincere or alienating the MPs who have flocked to his standard since Penny Mordaunt lost her seat.

Tugendhat clearly recognizes that this is a vulnerability; his initial op-ed in the Telegraph hinged on the dubious claim that the leadership contest was not about policy, because Tories all agree on the important policies. Yesterday’s law-and-order pitch was much stronger, but the question is, how many other policy areas like it can he find?

On the other side of the party, in the parallel race for the Right-wing slot in the final round, Robert Jenrick is the one to watch. He has by far the best-prepared and slickest campaign, with the only big launch event and a flurry of media hits, and aside from a few public missteps has handled the early weeks well.

Kemi Badenoch who is still in the lead, for now: in our latest ConservativeHome survey she picked up seven points and took a full third of members’ first preferences. She has a strong start, having led our Cabinet League Table for months; it helps having held a brief that allowed her to make strong interventions on cultural issues whilst avoiding responsibility for things like tax and immigration.

But it’s tough out in front, and the Shadow Housing Secretary has come in for attack like no other candidate. There were Civil Service leaks from her time in office, a barrage from Sir John Hayes about her allegedly low-profile response to the riots, and most recently The Sun dug up a video of her boasting in the House of Commons about defeating migrant caps.

For all that, she’s still in the lead, and it would be grossly premature to write her off. Three months is also a very long campaign, with plenty of time for her rivals to fall at a fence. Yet unless things ease up, we’ll need to see much more energy (and dare one say it, aggression) from her campaign than we have seen to date if she wants to maintain her lead.

---

Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

HCH_Hill

---

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.

---

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

miquelvilam

---