Britain waits on tenterhooks to see which Andy Burnham will enter No. 10 next month. Will he live up to the promises of “Manchesterism” and become the era-defining radical: a new Thatcher-in-reverse, waiting to bend the country’s governance structures and political economy to his will? Or will he be yet another dud, a bit-part player in our mismanaged decline?

Some claim disparagingly that the former Mayor of Greater Manchester will simply be a “Keir Starmer with vibes”. His vibes are certainly real: Burnham garnered over five million views this week with a tongue-in-cheek selfie video replying to a jibe from Kemi Badenoch, to which even Burnham-critics like Telegraph podcaster Tim Stanley replied, “If he calls an election right now, he’ll win.”

But the criticism of Burnham as simply a “cooler” Starmer ignores the centrality of character and communicative ability to political leadership. Could Ian Duncan Smith, armed with the same philosophical scaffolds, institutional support, advisors and detailed plans, have pulled off the Thatcherite revolution? It’s doubtful. Personality matters. Connection with the public matters. And there are signs that, in Burnham, Labour might have found its most instinctive and natural communicator since Blair, but one equipped for the age of the tech platform rather than the tabloid.

His almost-daily, straight-to-camera video updates embellish an image of Mr Normal, the blokey-but-unthreatening normie populist taking on the Whitehall machine. Critics seethe and baulk at the whole charade. But it’s a little different to Harold Wilson with his pipe, or Thatcher with her handbags. His response to Badenoch is a sign of what’s to come: expect a regular cultivation of the cheeky chappy, on-your-side schtick, projected via vertical video as the new fireside chat.

While leading the north-west’s largest combined authority, Burnham grew into the “King in the North” persona not with umpteen policy papers on “business-friendly socialism”, but by appearing, directly, to speak for the people during lockdown, articulating their grievances and frustrations against a faraway establishment. Critics may point to the apparent superficiality of it all. But in an era when politicians are roundly seen as robotic, boring, and downright weird (and often not without reason), differentiating yourself from the detached Brahmin class is core to generating public support.

There was a time when politicians spoke, and people listened, and even believed. The medium was radio and perhaps a couple of television channels. A man at the Beeb could push a button and define consensus reality for millions of Britons. But the information environment today is more hostile. Politicians jockey to put their message across against an infinite array of ideological entrepreneurs. The smartphone is ubiquitous, and the power of the old gatekeepers is diminished.

But alas, politics, as ever, is slow to come to terms with techno-cultural shifts. Parliamentarians like Keir Starmer still revere Aunty’s flagship news programmes and treat set-piece speeches as if the public will hang on their every word.

That is, save for a few populist outriders who have mastered the art of “cutting through” and speaking to the public, unfiltered and unmediated — at least in appearance. Nigel Farage can do it. Zohran Mamdani can do it. And Labour may have now found its first social media-savvy communicator as leader in the new PM-in-waiting.

The true task for Burnham, though, is coupling this ability with a genuine prospectus for change, as well as the force of will to drive the agenda through. Vibes are crucial, not an added extra. But without the necessary programme, it will be Sir Keir 2.0 — this time with rizz.

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Jonny Ball is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd. He formerly wrote under the name Despotic Inroad.

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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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