Exclusive: Boom Radio listeners share in election fatigue but demographic arguably has less to lose than younger voters

Sometimes only a song can sum up the national mood. When a soggy Rishi Sunak fired the starting gun on the general election in May, D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better blared across Downing Street. Five long weeks later and voters are cueing up rather more mordant tracks to capture their political fatigue.

Listeners to Boom Radio, asked to pick a classic song to sum up their feelings about the campaign, have selected Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (“Is this the real life?/Is this just fantasy? / Caught in a landslide / No escape from reality”) and Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower (“There must be some way out of here / Said the joker to the thief”).

With a job advert offering £2m, one tutor says such roles require huge amounts of commitment

This week, a job advert emerged for a private tutor to an architecture student with potential earnings of more than £2m. Here, Stephen*, who has worked as a private tutor to wealthy families for 16 years, describes what it takes. He has studied at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Pennsylvania. He speaks French, Italian, Japanese and English and plays the guitar and shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese vertical bamboo flute.

I have worked as a private tutor since 2007 including with families sailing round the world, living busy lives in London and on the continent and wintering in the Alps. Jobs generally last at least a year. My longest is four years. But in each case my intention is the same. Teaching is about making a positive contribution to the lives of young people.

Almost 12,000 rough sleepers were seen by outreach workers in 2023-24, a 19% increase on the previous year

Rough sleeping in the capital has hit the highest level in a decade, with more than 1,100 people living on London’s streets for the first time because of evictions.

The number of new rough sleepers seen for the first time by outreach workers between April 2023 and March 2024, surged 25% to 7,974 people – the highest in at least four years. Almost one in 10 people living on the streets was aged 25 or under – including 13 children.

Two cancer patients call on election winner to end options of suffering, death at Dignitas, or taking their own lives

Two women with incurable cancer are urging the next UK prime minister to allow a vote on assisted dying in the first 100 days of the new parliament and free them from fear of a painful death.

Sophie Blake, 51, a former Sky Sports reporter, and Helen Skelton, 56, a psychotherapist, who both have stage 4 cancer, said the next prime minister should make a free vote a priority to stop people having to choose between unnecessary suffering, going to Dignitas in Switzerland, or taking their own lives at home.