The entire Westminster village now assumes that Kemi Badenoch will be unveiled as the new leader of the Opposition on Saturday. Chancellor Rachel Reeves even singled out the Tory contender for a spot of pre-emptive taunting during Wednesday’s Budget when she referred to workplace bullying and cuts to maternity pay.

On this occasion, the conventional wisdom in Westminster will almost certainly be proven correct. Polling of Tory grassroots members has consistently found Badenoch to be comfortably ahead of rival Robert Jenrick; the bookies’ odds are massively in her favour, and even some of her opponent’s core supporters privately admit she is on track for victory.

All of which makes Jenrick’s recent campaigning intensity and tone particularly fascinating. He could easily have dialled things down and sued for peace with Badenoch, taking satisfaction from having transformed himself from a top-30 Tory a year ago to a top-three Tory now and awaiting a plum Shadow Cabinet job offer. This would have been the orthodox strategy for someone seen to have fought an impressive campaign but from too far back to win.

Yet he has done the very opposite, getting under Badenoch’s skin by accusing her of disrespecting party members in avoiding debates with him and failing to outline her policies. More than that, he has ramped up the controversy quotient of his public utterances generally.

Looking at Jenrick’s two most recent interventions on topical issues is instructive. He went so far as to say that, far from being due reparations, many former colonies owed a “debt of gratitude” to the British Empire, leading Labour Left-winger Bell Ribeiro-Addy to brand his comments “deeply offensive and obnoxious”.

On the issue of more information tumbling out about the Southport stabbings, Jenrick’s response included the suggestion that “across the board the hard reality of mass migration is being covered up.” He singled out crime statistics as an area of particular concern.

It is not only Labour figures who are up in arms at his high-octane approach, but also figures from within the Tory establishment. Theresa May’s former chief of staff Gavin Barwell suggested: “If Robert wins on Saturday, it is clear that the Conservative Party will go full Trump/Farage, attacking our institutions and promoting online conspiracy theories.”

For once, Barwell may be onto something. For though Jenrick is unlikely to win, it does indeed seem he has taken a long-term bet on a radical Right-wing cultural movement becoming an inexorable force in our politics.

Only a couple of years ago, Badenoch was viewed as about as daring as it was possible for a Tory to be on this territory. Now, she is regarded as the safe and even relatively centrist choice by Tory grandees such as William Hague and George Osborne.

Jenrick, meanwhile, has won the belated backing of his former Home Office boss and Cambridge University contemporary Suella Braverman, while the veteran former minister John Hayes, a social conservative of the Roger Scruton school, is a key influence upon both. Lord Frost and several senior figures in the Right-wing Conservative Democratic Organisation have also converged with the trio, creating a powerful hard-Right nexus with an overall policy shopping list that has major overlaps with Reform UK.

It is possible that Badenoch, who has refused to be tied down to particular flagship policies and pledges, will in due course tick off those items herself. But it is equally possible she will tack towards the conventional establishment centre ground on some key points.

Some of Jenrick’s more careerist Parliamentary supporters may well accept frontbench jobs from Badenoch, but many of the 40 Tory MPs who voted for him in the fourth leadership ballot seem likely to sit it out alongside Jenrick, Braverman and Hayes on the backbenches.

Next week will no doubt see Badenoch winning wall-to-wall media coverage, and she is eminently capable of making a huge impact. But make no mistake: the ballad of Bobby J also has several verses yet to be sung.

---

Patrick O’Flynn is a former MEP and political editor of the Daily Express.

oflynnsocial

---

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

---