When a bronzed former Apprentice star who grew up in the suburbs of a global city starts making political noises, it’s best to take them seriously. And maybe JD Vance saw a flicker of his boss’s bolshy spirit in Thomas Skinner when he decided to invite the TV personality for a barbecue during his Cotswolds holiday this week. Either that or, like any good X poster, he just wanted to meet one of his online friends in person. The response has been predictable: Adam Miller lamented in the Metro that “Skinner insists he’s not far-right, but gleefully poses with one of the most extreme vice-presidents in recent memory.”

Skinner has been on a journey, and not only from Romford to Charlbury. After his appearance on The Apprentice in 2019, he built up a dependable social media shtick — shepherd’s pie and Christmas dinner for breakfast, pouring gravy without looking, saying “bosh” a lot — and progressed onto the C-list celebrity TV circuit, with appearances on 8 Out of 10 Cats, Celebrity Masterchef and the rest. Truly, what more could a man want? Why throw away the chance of another turn on Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel with the hearty praise for Donald Trump he tweeted last November? Why speak alongside Rupert Lowe and Danny Kruger at the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation’s “Now and England” conference in June? Why film vertical videos with Robert Jenrick?

Not that it actually seems to have harmed his old media career: Skinner has now been announced as a contestant on next month’s new series of Strictly Come Dancing. Though there’s been a half-hearted backlash to the news — including from his regular X sparring partner Narinder Kaur — there’s no blood-in-the-water sense of genuine cancellation here, partly because Skinner maintains a degree of geezerish cuddliness that your average Right-wing social media personality very much lacks.

His posts are still packed with generic motivational slop. Examples include “Life is crazy. Gotta grab everything with both hands and take it for what it is” and “Never take any criticism from anyone you wouldn’t take advice from.” And as with many political animals, Skinner presents his politics not as politics — “I’m not political myself,” he has maintained — but as common sense. He just loves his country, and London, and hates to see anyone do them down.

But the fact he has veered into politics at all is noteworthy, and in contrast to similar influencers like John “Big John” Fisher, the other man who says “bosh” while shovelling down Chinese food on our timelines. Skinner’s politicisation could be a straightforward grift in keeping with his wheeler-dealer history: in 2011 he was convicted of handling £40,000 in stolen Body Shop merchandise. But the Right might say, similarly straightforwardly, that he’s just a regular bloke whose conscience has been inflamed by the material conditions of life in modern Britain.

Both explanations probably have truth to them. More important are the conditions of posting on X in 2025. The platform’s facts of life are Right-wing, like they used to be Left-wing in its previous incarnation as Twitter. The way to get engagement is either to bait Right-wingers, like Kaur does, or to stroke their egos and validate their concerns. Viral videos of migrants behaving badly have the same function as pastel-coloured infographics on BLM-era Instagram: they set the political tone, structure the debate and let people signal, via reposting and commenting, where they stand in relation to the dominant ideology.

Skinner has probably spent a lot of time on X, and seen a lot of those videos. But his white-working-class presentation means he only needs to deliver the occasional cheeky wink — a “London has fallen” here, an England flag emoji there — to assure his audience he’s one of them. Nigel Farage has already proved, via his potency on both TikTok and I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!, that Britain’s populist Right can span across both new media and old media. Indeed, the most effective figures use each to amplify their presence on the other. It’s Skinner on Strictly this year. Next year, one of the X anon accounts might unmask for their go on the dance floor.

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Josiah Gogarty is a writer at British GQ.

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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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