First minister says voters being disfranchised because some ballots yet to arrive with school holidays due to begin

John Swinney, the Scottish first minister, has raised concerns that voters are being disfranchised because of delays in receiving postal votes.

Voters in some parts of the UK, particularly Scotland, have not received their postal ballots ahead of the election on 4 July. Postal vote requests are particularly high in Scotland because schools are on holiday next week.

Essex police say they are ‘urgently assessing’ racist and homophobic remarks made by party’s volunteers

Rishi Sunak has said he was hurt and angry to hear a Reform UK canvasser using a racial slur against him, saying Nigel Farage “has some questions to answer”.

The prime minister responded after a Channel 4 undercover investigation found a Reform campaigner had called him a “fucking [P-word]”. Sunak repeated the slur and said he had done so because it was important to call it out for what it was.

Exclusive: Former Labour leader calls on party to ratchet up scrutiny of Reform in final week of campaign

Neil Kinnock has warned his party not to ignore the nationalist threat posed by Nigel Farage, as concern grows in Labour ranks that Reform UK could pose a long-term threat for them as well as for the Conservatives.

The former Labour leader told the Guardian he wanted Labour to turn its guns on Farage’s party in the final week of the election campaign, saying the populist right could gain a stronghold in the UK as it has across much of Europe.

At the Mediterrane film festival in Malta, the film-maker spoke out against UK citizens ‘seeing justification in not voting’ in the general election

Mike Leigh has criticised UK voters considering abstention at this year’s general election, saying the subjects of his 2018 historical drama Peterloo would be appalled by such disengagement.

Speaking at the Mediterrane film festival in Malta, Leigh said the protesters who gathered in St Peter’s Field in Manchester to demand the reform of parliamentary representation in 1819 would be “not only horrified but mystified” about “people procrastinating about whether to vote and seeing justification in not voting, which is what’s happening right now”.

Nigel Farage’s party is poaching angry Conservative voters, but damage control measures may limit the impact

The Labour lead in the opinion polls has been 20 percentage points throughout the campaign. But the polls haven’t been entirely static.

Over the past five weeks there has been one key change in polling that has the potential to turn a historic defeat for the Conservatives into an obliteration when the election is called.

In today’s newsletter: What a spate of offensive comments from volunteers and candidates reveal about the Reform UK agenda – and how they might affect its support

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Good afternoon. You’re safe here: after this sentence, there will be absolutely no mention of what happened in American politics last night. We now go live to Britain, where everything is totally fine, and Nigel Farage is desperately trying to distance himself from some of the most flagrantly racist political campaigners you will find this side of a National Front rally.

More on what to make of Reform’s problem with its own people, and a truly horrifying general election diet, after the headlines.

Economy | The UK economy grew at a faster rate than previously thought in the first quarter of 2024, handing the next prime minister an improved economic backdrop. The data confirmed that the UK was the fastest-growing economy in the G7 during the first quarter after a short recession in 2023.

Labour | Stamp duty will rise for first-time buyers next year if Labour wins the election, the party has confirmed, as it plans to allow a temporary tax break enacted by the Conservatives to expire. A party spokesperson said on Friday it would allow the threshold for stamp duty to fall back to £300,000, after it was raised to £425,000 in 2022.

Conservatives | Rishi Sunak’s most senior adviser has been interviewed as a witness as part of the Gambling Commission’s investigation into widespread betting by Westminster figures on the date and outcome of the general election. Sources told the BBC that Liam Booth-Smith was not a suspect and had not placed a bet himself.

Politicians are refusing to acknowledge the link between Brexit and falling living standards, says Robin Prior, while Chris Webster says voters must accept responsibility for their choices

Larry Elliott is correct that Brexit is a live issue in this election, even if politicians are doing their best to avoid it (Brexit may have felt absent from this election – but it will still define it, 26 June). And he is spot-on when he says that there is “no real difference between Labour’s growth strategy and its Brexit strategy. If one fails then so does the other”.

Keir Starmer says Labour will boost economic growth while continuing to hobble trade and relations with our nearest major market. It’s as if his shoes are tied together, but he’s refusing to untie them while also promising to win an international running race. Does he really take us for fools?

The Conservatives have taken to venting their frustrations publicly, and often in very vivid terms

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When the former Olympic rower James Cracknell, a Tory candidate, called his own party a “shower of shit” this week, he was not the first Tory to pour scorn on their electoral efforts.

A disastrous campaign, kicked off by Rishi Sunak in heavy rain and mired in repeated insider betting scandals, has led many Conservatives to vent their frustrations publicly. Here are some of their thoughts on their own party.

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”).

Betting on election date merits serious investigation but it is not an offence for MPs to bet on themselves winning

Until the past few weeks, online casinos and bookmakers have made handy villains for an under-pressure government.

Ministers could legitimately claim to be cleaning up Labour’s mess with reforms that partially roll back the permissive regulatory regime ushered in under Tony Blair.

Let’s take Starmer at his word that it is the party of wealth creation and growth, not redistribution and equality. What will this mean for our politics?

We now live, despite appearances, in an age of consensus. We should perhaps call it Starnakism, a much more profound consensus than Blatcherism (the portmanteau of Blair and Thatcher) or the postwar Butskellism (Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell). Its most telling feature is that the Labour party’s fundamental criticism of the Tories is their lack of competence, rather than their policies.

Yet the idea that Labour remains a progressive social democratic party hiding in plain sight is still in the air. While it is granted this is not obvious from its programme, it is held that deep down it is the party of change, of welfare, of state intervention; the party of labour rather than of capital, the party of international law, not war. It is held that in power, either circumstances or opportunity will make it more radical. That hope animates many.

David Edgerton is Hans Rausing professor of the history of science and technology, professor of modern British history at King’s College London, and the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation

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Liam Booth-Smith spoke to regulator after revelations about betting by those close to PM on date of election

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Rishi Sunak’s most senior adviser has been interviewed as a witness by officials at the Gambling Commission as part of its investigation into widespread betting by Westminster figures on the date and outcome of the general election.

Liam Booth-Smith, the prime minister’s chief of staff, spoke to the regulator last week after a series of revelations about betting by people close to the prime minister on the date of the election.

Sometimes Sunak only makes sense if you assume he is actively trying to lose this joyless election

Less than a week to go. For which everyone – most politicians included – will be breathing a huge sigh of relief. Rishi Sunak must be wondering why on earth he chose to go for a six-week campaign when he had so little to say and such a poor record to defend. It’s as if he’s already given up and is just going through the motions.

Nor have Labour appeared that energised by being clear favourites to win a large majority next Thursday. Their main aim has been to do as little as possible. To not rock the boat and to let the Tory party self-destruct. To be fair, it looks to have been a successful strategy so far but it has made the last few weeks feel particularly joyless. Keir Starmer, knowing he will inherit a mess, is so desperate not to raise expectations too high that his pitch has often sounded like: “Vote for me. Things will be a bit less rubbish.”

Owner of plants in south Wales says it could cease operations at blast furnaces in response to strike action

Labour politicians have been urged to step in to help avert a “costly mistake” by Tata Steel, which has told staff it could close operations at its steel plant in Port Talbot just days after the general election.

The Indian owner of the vast south Wales steelworks said on Thursday that it intended to cease operations at two blast furnaces on the site by 7 July – three days after the general election – in response to strike action announced by Unite members from 8 July. The company had planned to shut one furnace by the end of June and a second by September.

In a new constituency where the river ‘is our lifeblood’, people speak of being taken for granted by the Tories

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By conventional political logic, it is a long jump from the Conservatives to the Green party. But in Waveney Valley, voters are making that leap. Political history, party stereotypes and predictable voter behaviour are sailing away down the river that meanders through this new constituency, carved from five ultra-safe Tory seats on the Norfolk/Suffolk border.

Waveney Valley should be a win so comfortable for the Conservatives that they barely need to turn up. One of its former constituencies has been Tory since 1885; all five had Conservative majorities of more than 18,000 in 2019. “It’s been Tory since the Norman conquest,” says Robert Lindsay, a Green councillor who is part of an eager team of party activists descending on this rural heartland to boost co-leader Adrian Ramsay’s hopes of victory.

Updated quarterly GDP confirms UK was fastest-growing economy in G7 with consumer confidence returning

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The UK economy grew at a faster rate than previously thought in the first quarter of 2024, handing the next prime minister an improved economic backdrop.

Gross domestic product (GDP) rose by 0.7% in the first three months of 2024, revised upwards by the Office for National Statistics from a first estimate of 0.6%.

Sir Keir Starmer must win. Only his government can shape the future we want to see

The quirk of elections is that they tend to be swung by the public voting against, rather than for, a party. The sentiment is often either to kick one party out of power and give another a chance, or to re-elect the incumbents for fear of the alternative. In 2019, voters stuck with the devil they knew. This time, polls suggest that the Conservatives will be dumped from office. Their removal cannot come a moment too soon.

The Tories don’t deserve to win. After 14 years in power, they are a shambles. The original sin was austerity. But the precipitating crisis of this government was when voters were told that leaving the EU with the thinnest of deals would be good for them. Nothing could have been further from the truth. From the Pandora’s box of Brexit flew the furies of conspiracy, dishonesty, government abuse and executive overreach. It has been five years of unremitting cruelty and chaos. Starved public services and a miserly welfare state have seen life become poorer, nastier, more brutish and shorter. The right’s obsession with putting the state at the service of the market is destroying councils and universities, and spewing sewage into rivers.

Will the return to ‘boring’ politics make all Britain’s problems magically disappear? If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you

“We’re not pitching you a new Netflix series,” intoned Labour’s shadow business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, this week. “We’re not putting on politics as entertainment.” And certainly absolutely no one could accuse the extremely likely next government of that. The thing about a new Netflix series, of course, is that the streamer will want to have an absolutely nailed-down idea of how much it is going to cost and how it will be funded before it gets the green light. Weirdly, you have to do this if you are pitching Is It Cake?, but not if you are seeking to run the world’s sixth-largest economy. This means it’s possible that the thing the frontrunner party tells you is the manifesto is not actually a manifesto, but something else. Cake, maybe. Is it cake?

“We want to return to serious government,” Reynolds continued loftily, “to effective policy and to politics as public service, not as pantomime.” Right. One of the things we’ve heard for some time now is ordinary people saying they just want politics to be boring again – which is understandable, but always feels rather cargo-cultish. It is as though the fact that politics was boring back in the good times logically means that the good times can be restored by somehow making politics boring. I … don’t think it works like that. Without wishing to unleash any spoilers for the season ahead, the UK faces huge and deepening problems – and anyone who tells you they can be fixed by “boring politics” is selling something.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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In the third episode of a new series of Anywhere but Westminster, John Harris and John Domokos travel around the West Midlands, and find a fascinating political mixture: hesitant Labour voters, a new crop of independents focused on Palestine and local cuts  – and, amid deep social problems, lots of people who think the election hardly matters. Here, it seems, is the reality that all those opinion polls get nowhere near

• Why are the Tories collapsing? These true-blue towns know the answers - video

• This Labour city backed Brexit and went Tory: what did it get in return? - video

The PM trumpeted ‘a recording … admitting that their plans will cost hundreds of billions’. Was it fair to do so?

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have faced off for the final time in a TV debate, trading familiar blows over immigration and tax. Sunak came armed with a new attack line over the cost of Labour’s net zero climate plans, but does it stack up?

The affluent constituency is home to Mayfair clubs, Soho theatres and City types – one of whom told me: ‘We need to pay more tax’

A red glow spreading across the land may be so bright you could see it from space, if polling predictions are right. In that Labour flare, let’s pinpoint one astonishing constituency the party looks likely to win for the first time in history. Conservative for ever, the City itself, part of the Cities of London and Westminster constituency, would be turning red. Look at the symbolism.

The king in Buckingham Palace would have a Labour MP for the first time. So would the Palace of Westminster, the supreme court, the Old Bailey, Scotland Yard, Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, Catholic Westminster Cathedral and Methodist Central Hall.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

PM responds to comments by Reform activists, who were filmed by Channel 4 reporter while canvassing in Clacton

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Here’s the latest in the Guardian’s series on The broken years: Tory Britain 2010-24:

Unless the polls are wildly inaccurate, the Conservative party is heading towards a catastrophic defeat in the coming election.

Our panel of undecided voters on whether their views have changed in recent weeks – and who will get their support

As many as 15% of British voters are still undecided about who to vote for. How they make up their minds will have seismic consequences for the UK’s political future – so the Guardian has spoken to a range of undecided voters from across the country. In the second part of this series, we hear how their opinions have changed in recent weeks, and whether they have come to a decision on who to vote for ahead of next week’s ballot.

The party’s pledge for the NHS is ‘hugely ambitious’, says one expert, though others are more optimistic.

• UK election live – latest updates

Labour appears poised to win a historic election victory on 4 July. In the series Life under Labour, we look at Keir Starmer’s five key political missions and ask what is at stake and whether he can deliver the change the country is crying out for.

“If they came into power, the Labour party would inherit a really terrible set of problems in the NHS that are both broader and deeper than the ones they faced in 1997. This feels a lot worse,” says Siva Anandaciva, the chief analyst at the King’s Fund thinktank.

The Conservatives want us to think child poverty is somehow normal. When you vote next Thursday, remember that chilling fact

If you want to understand what 14 years of Conservative rule has done to this country, look no further than Baby Aid in Birmingham. Run out of an unused room in a church, the charity is the kind of service that – once a rarity – has become common in almost every town and city over the past decade, bleeding into community centres, mosques and village halls.

Like a food bank, Baby Aid fills in the cracks where the welfare state once stood. Referred by a support worker or midwife and delivered by a team of volunteers, parents of young children in crisis are given essentials: from clothes for toddlers to Moses baskets for newborns who have nowhere to sleep.

Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist

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Labour talked tough on regulation in its manifesto, but questions have been raised about how it will proceed with legislation if it comes into office

In February 2020, with the race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader heating up, Keir Starmer’s office received a helping hand.

Peter Coates, the head of the dynasty behind Stoke-based online gambling company Bet365, donated £25,000 to Starmer’s office.

Shadow minister, in demand for his campaigning ability, believes some on left ‘allow perfect to be the enemy of good’

In the beating sunshine deep in the heart of one of the Conservatives’ safest Midlands seats, Wes Streeting is slapping on factor 50 for another afternoon in pursuit of a historic Labour majority. It is in these safe seats where it will be seen whether the extinction-level predictions for the Tories are accurate.

But Streeting, who has been dispatched by Labour HQ to crisscross the country hundreds of miles, says his party is feeling the heat of undecided voters – and during a half hour of canvassing, there are plenty of them politely reluctant to commit to Labour.

If the polls are correct, an era is about to come to an end. What have 14 years of Conservative government done to the country? Jonathan Freedland reports

When a fresh-faced David Cameron made his pitch to the country in 2010, he promised to mend what he called “broken Britain”.

In this first episode in a two-part series, Jonathan Freedland and Helen Pidd discuss how Cameron introduced the idea of the “big society”, arguing that it would be communities, rather than government, that would improve the country. He promised a kinder, gentler Conservative party that would give real power to charities and neighbourhood groups to change the UK for the better.

Representatives from DUP, Sinn Féin, UUP, SDLP and Alliance to face off from 9pm

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Speaking at a Reform UK event in Boston with party leader Nigel Farage, chairman of the party Richard Tice said that the racist comments discovered by a Channel 4 investigation during the Reform campaign were “inappropriate”.

Tice said:

We put a statement out and it’s all self-explanatory in the statement.

The reality is that we’re a fast-growing movement, and when you’ve got unpaid volunteers, some people behave inappropriately. And they’re gone.”

We’ve had one or two candidates that have said things they shouldn’t have said. In most cases they’re just speaking like ordinary folk.

They’re not part of the mainstream political Oxbridge speak, we understand that. In some cases one or two people let us down and we let them go.

Gavin Robinson, leader of the Democratic Unionist party (DUP).

Chris Hazzard, Sinn Féin MP candidate.

Colum Eastwood, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP).

Naomi Long, leader of the Alliance party.

Robbie Butler, deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist party (UUP).

Craig Williams could come under scope of criminal investigation as Met looks at possible misconduct in public office

The Metropolitan police have indicated that the dropped Conservative candidate Craig Williams could come under the scope of a criminal investigation into betting on the election that has overshadowed Rishi Sunak’s campaign.

Scotland Yard will investigate any suspicious bets that could represent a misconduct in public office offence, while the Gambling Commission will continue to look at whether betting rules were broken.

Andrew Parker, who is canvassing in Clacton, also described Islam as ‘a cult’ and suggested asylum seekers should be shot

A Reform UK activist in the constituency where Nigel Farage is standing has been secretly filmed making extremely racist comments about Rishi Sunak, as well as using Islamophobic and other offensive language.

Farage said he was “dismayed” by the views expressed by Andrew Parker, a Reform canvasser, who was filmed as part of an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News.

Exclusive: Shadow health secretary discusses plans for waiting lists and patient safety if Labour wins election

NHS managers who silence and scapegoat whistleblowers will be banned from working in the service, the shadow health secretary has said, as part of a determined drive by Labour to eradicate a culture of cover-ups.

In an interview with the Guardian, Wes Streeting pledged to push through the formal regulation of NHS managers and warned the Care Quality Commission (CQC) that its inspectors must get much better at exposing risks to patients’ safety in order to regain the confidence of frontline staff.

The TV contests between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were sometimes illuminating, but they avoided the big questions facing Britain

Televised leaders’ debates came late to British general elections. Margaret Thatcher never appeared in one. Nor did Tony Blair. It was not until 2010 that the main UK party leaders took part in the first debates. Since then, debates have become an accepted part of the election campaign landscape. Apart from Theresa May, who refused, to her cost, to take part in 2017, party leaders now recognise that such debates come with the territory.

The 2024 debates have occasionally been illuminating but have generally been uninspiring. Few can argue that they either defined or answered the big questions, on the economy, health, climate and defence, facing Britain. In Wednesday’s BBC debate, the final one of this year’s contest, Rishi Sunak opted for repeated attack as the best form of defence, hammering the line that Labour could not be trusted on tax and migration. Sir Keir Starmer opted for steady reassurance, while attacking the Conservatives over the betting scandal. It was negativity versus safety first.

The Reform UK candidate brought the air of a televangelist to a rally in Sunderland that was all show and no substance

Call it confirmation bias. The media were the ones who wanted endless debates – the public would have been happy with one or two at most – and so it was inevitable that the media would declare them to be important waypoints on the campaign trail. But were they?

Sure, the debates were picked over forensically, but strip out the sound and fury and you’re left with very little we didn’t already know. Rishi Sunak might have been even more thin-skinned and tetchy and Keir Starmer rather more wooden than we might have imagined but this is all surface trivia. Nothing new in concrete policy terms was revealed. Just the familiar half-truths and evasions with which we are all too familiar. Manifesto pledges that almost certainly won’t stand contact with reality.

Guardian Newsroom: Election results special On Friday 5 July, 7.30pm-9pm BST, join Hugh Muir, Gaby Hinsliff, John Crace, Jonathan Freedland and Zoe Williams for unrivalled analysis of the general election results. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live.

Labour leader says halting of asylum processing due to government’s Rwanda policy ‘absurd and reckless’

Keir Starmer has admitted for the first time that he would not return people to Afghanistan, after a bitter exchange in Wednesday night’s debate where Rishi Sunak mocked him for planning to “sit down with the ayatollahs” to negotiate return agreements.

Starmer has repeatedly said he plans to negotiate returns agreements with safe countries in order to clear the asylum backlog, which has worsened due to the government’s recent legislation which does not allow asylum seekers to be processed while it waits to start deportations to Rwanda.

Apathy and antipathy towards all parties is a growing trend in UK elections. But with a week to go, undecided voters could prove critical to the result. Archie Bland reports

Prime minister’s campaign has become the only spectacle less appealing than England at the Euros

“I will never stop fighting for this country,” ran Rishi Sunak’s morning message to a nation that, if the polls are to be believed, overwhelmingly just wants him to stop fighting for this country ASAP. In any case, since almost the start of this campaign, the prime minister has been pegged as a Normandy deserter. He totally wanted to fight on the beaches for this country – but unfortunately he wanted to do a telly interview more.

Undeterred, however, Sunak appended the above message to today’s exciting new Conservative attack ad. This shows an elderly man, a woman and a child from behind, holding up their hands. We know it’s a surrender because the caption is “DON’T SURRENDER YOUR FAMILY’S FUTURE TO LABOUR”. Probably the best thing you can say about it is that it’s good the actors could get paid the day rate without having to show their faces to the camera.

Finding a balance between privatisation and nationalisation has defied past governments – the party must make this its mission

To tax or not to tax? Labour’s plan to impose VAT on private schools seemed a good idea at the time. Its programme was bereft of leftist clout. The tax would hit privilege at its roots, and bring in a windfall £1.6bn to benefit deprived state schools. What was not to like?

The trouble is that every tax carries unintended consequences. Estimates were that most parents would simply pay up. Schools would cut costs, offset VAT-able expenses and boost bursaries. Fees should not rise by more than 15%, which is what they have recently done anyway. The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has indicated that she will not target parents with children who are at a critical stage of their school careers. The new tax will be gradual.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Desmond Swayne is predicted to be re-elected yet again in a seat where most of the population are over 50 and some are ‘terrified of Labour’

Betty Granger refuses to give up hope for another Conservative government. Sipping tea in the New Milton Conservative Club in Hampshire, Granger, 97, says she has her “fingers crossed” for a Tory win.

She posted her 21st vote for them earlier this week. “I can’t think what anybody else would’ve done better,” she says of their record.

Exclusive: Raymond Saint, who is standing in Basingstoke, was recorded as BNP member on list published in 2009

• UK election live – latest updates

A Reform UK general election candidate has been dropped after it emerged that he had been on a list of members of the British National party (BNP).

Raymond Saint, a retired owner of a plumbing company, had been standing for the radical right populist party in Basingstoke. A Raymond Saint, at the same address, was recorded as a member of the BNP in a list that was published by WikiLeaks in 2009.

Shadow business secretary says trying to rejoin single market or customs union would cause ‘more difficulties’

Labour would rather have stability in the UK’s relationship with the Europe than try to seek accelerated economic growth by rejoining the EU’s single market or customs union, the party’s shadow business secretary has said.

Addressing the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) conference on Thursday, Jonathan Reynolds acknowledged that Brexit had been “very difficult for businesses” because it erected trade barriers, but said reopening the debate would be worse.

A landslide victory for Keir Starmer could lead to hubris and division. For Conservatives, however, it’s an existential question

Can a political party win too much power? In many ways, it’s a strange fear to raise about Labour, yet the Conservatives have been doing it for weeks now. For only two periods in Labour’s 124-year history has it had huge parliamentary majorities: from 1945 to 1950 and 1997 to 2005. And even those two governments still faced hostile newspapers, sceptical civil servants, suspicious big business, millions of instinctively rightwing voters in the most prosperous regions and the pro-Tory bias of much of the establishment.

For the Conservatives to warn about the dangerous monopoly power of a Labour “supermajority”, having sought and enjoyed such power much more often themselves, is shameless even by their standards. For many Labour politicians, activists and supporters, meanwhile, the possibility that the party could enter an era of rare dominance next week is – though they dare not say it yet – very exciting. If the polls are right, the 2024 election and the Starmer supremacy that may follow could become legends that Labour lives off for decades.

The PM had points to make against an eminently beatable opponent, but I’m not sure the public wants to hear them now

Freedom, as the song has it, is “just another word for nothing left to lose”. So, with most voters having long since made up their minds (and millions of postal ballots already cast), was last night’s bravura debate performance a belated glimpse of the sort of prime minister Rishi Sunak might have been? It will certainly aid the revisionists who wish to try to see his tenure in another light. But there is a world of difference between delivering a good debate performance, which Sunak did last night, and a programme for government.

Sunak has always seemed to me a better speaker than some give him credit for. In person, at the London hustings against Liz Truss during the 2022 Conservative leadership contest, he struck me as genuinely impressive at the town hall format (and not just because of his opponent, who was so wooden one suspects the sorcerer’s apprentice had enchanted a mop as a stand-in).

Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome

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Hundreds are knocking on doors for longtime MP, often having to remind voters that he is no longer Labour

• UK election live – latest updates

Jeremy Corbyn is making a final push to try to hold on to his parliamentary seat in one of the more unpredictable battles of the election, made more uncertain because many voters still seem to believe he is the Labour candidate.

With a week to go until polling day, the former Labour leader’s campaign team is trying to marshal crowds of volunteers to knock on doors in the Islington North seat he has represented since 1983, reminding them that this race is different.

Central bank raises concerns over newly elected governments as more than 80 countries go to polls this year

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Uncertainty caused by a global wave of elections, starting this weekend in France, risks destabilising the UK’s financial system, the Bank of England has warned.

Officials are concerned about the kind of policies that newly elected governments may enforce in large economies, including the US, where Donald Trump is vying for another term as president in the run-up to the election in November.

Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay can be in two places at once on campaign trail as party hopes to win four seats

• UK election live – latest updates

For some viewers it might have been the first time they noticed the Greens this general election, but it was quite the impression. Midway through the first seven-way TV debate there was a brief pause after Angela Rayner and Penny Mordaunt had bickered noisily on tax, and another participant stepped in.

“Well, that was dignified, wasn’t it?” began Carla Denyer, winning laughter and applause from the audience. Leading a smaller party in an election tends to be a balancing act between strategy and simply getting attention. Thus far, it appears, the Greens have done both fairly well.

ITN’s Tom Bradby raised the alarm, but I’m not sure it’s a problem to worry me or David Attenborough. Viewers benefit from diversity behind the desk

Since the last general election, we have gone through three prime ministers, changed monarchs and seen a record number of scandal-fuelled resignations from the cabinet. But at least one thing will remain the same. Tom Bradby will be back to present ITV’s coverage of election night, joined once more by George Osborne and Ed Balls.

There is comfort in familiarity, but maybe not for Bradby and the like. Speaking to the Radio Times about the coverage, he suggested that perhaps, career-wise, he should be nervous as “there aren’t many white male anchors left”.

Leila Latif is a freelance writer and critic

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