As internal plots swirl around her, Kemi Badenoch shows no sign of giving up as Conservative leader. But for rival parties, it would seem that she is no longer the main Tory target. In the wake of Tuesday’s High Court ruling, which blocked the housing of asylum seekers at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Reform UK has stepped up its online campaign against Shadow Justice Secretary — and the man tipped by many to soon succeed Badenoch — Robert Jenrick.

The Epping judgment, as well as figures published this morning which reveal that a record 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK during Keir Starmer’s first year in office, has made immigration the hot-button topic of the week in British politics. After Jenrick attended a protest in Epping on Sunday against the housing of illegal immigrants, Zia Yusuf, the head of Reform’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, highlighted the Tory politician’s previous claims during his time as immigration minister, when he said that he was seeking to “procure even more” migrant hotels. Since then, Reform’s X page has shared three posts directly attacking Jenrick’s comments, as well as retweeting similar accusations from Yusuf and party leader Nigel Farage. In contrast, the account has name-checked Badenoch just once since early June.

Jenrick has sought to position himself as the standard-bearer of the Tory Right, even outflanking Farage on issues such as immigration and crime. On Monday, citing Jenrick’s earlier comments on migrant hotels, the Reform UK leader called him a “fraud”. Later that day, the official Reform account said the Shadow Justice Secretary “should be in hiding”. Yesterday, Farage posted a video doubling down on the attack, claiming that during Jenrick’s time as immigration minister “we got up to 56,000 people who’d crossed the channel by boat living in hotels,” and adding that “this man is not to be trusted.”

Responding to the Reform claims, Jenrick posted on Tuesday that the suggestion he was “bragging” about opening new hotels for migrants was “absurd” and “a complete lie”. He also accused Yusuf of doctoring footage to misrepresent him, and argued that, alongside then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman, he “set in train the closing of 100 hotels”. Farage’s figure of 56,00 referred to the peak number of asylum seekers being housed in hotel accommodation in the UK, which occurred in September 2023 during the Tories’ time in power. The current total, as most recently measured in April of this year, is 33,000.

Labour has also targeted Jenrick instead of Badenoch in recent days, settling on the same Faragist attack line. On Monday, the party’s X account shared the same 2022 clip of the Conservative frontbencher discussing the increased procurement of hotels, captioning it: “You couldn’t trust [the Tories] then. You can’t trust them now.” This follows a series of Labour ads highlighting Farage’s alleged ties to figures as disparate as Vladimir Putin and Andrew Tate, another sign that Badenoch is not considered by her rivals to be the most potent figure on the British Right. According to aggregate polling by Politico, Reform is currently eight points ahead of Labour — and 11 ahead of the Tories.

Last night, Labour MP Jake Richards sent Badenoch a letter questioning Jenrick’s presence at the Epping protest alongside Eddy Butler, a former strategist for the far-Right British National Party. The Government backbencher said Jenrick had shown “a staggering lack of judgement”, given that he “once proudly boasted about ramping up the procurement of asylum hotels”. For the Shadow Justice Minister, the problem is more fundamental. Responding to Farage’s attacks, he said: “Why not focus on Starmer and the country, instead of pushing false and petty crap?”

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Rob Lownie is UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, Newsroom.

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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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