In case you missed anything, here's a quick round-up of what happened yesterday on the campaign trail:

• Boris Johnson made a late intervention in the campaign, appearing before Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at a rally in central London. He told the audience it was "not too late" to "draw back from the brink" and stop Labour forming the next government
• Following reported delays in postal vote deliveries, the Royal Mail said there was "no backlog" and that it remained "confident" that postal votes received on time would be delivered before polling day
• Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer described as "laughably pathetic" criticism of him by the Conservatives for suggesting he would like to take Friday evenings off to spend time with his family. "I’d like to try and protect it in the future but I know very well it’s going to be really difficult to do it," he said
• The Lib Dem campaign staged another attention-grabbing stunt, with leader Sir Ed Davey going surfing in Bude, Cornwall to highlight the issue of sewage
• Reform UK leader Richard Tice told the BBC that Labour was going to win the election but that a "complete realignment of the right of politics" was needed. "You cannot reward failure and the Tories have broken Britain," he said
• SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn told the BBC that Labour's insistence it would not participate in negotiations for another Scottish independence referendum was "not good enough".

Image source, PA Media

It is six weeks to the day since Prime Minister Rishi Sunak got a drenching in Downing Street and the general election campaign began.

So, what has changed, what hasn’t changed and what does this tell us about where we find ourselves?

The stand-out fact at the heart of this campaign is that for all the noise and hullaballoo over the past month-and-a-half, the colossal gap in the opinion polls between Labour and the Conservatives has barely budged.

Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour team have been quietly preparing for government, while wracked with a paranoia about complacency.

Nothing the prime minister has attempted, both during his conventional time in office and then during this campaign, appears to have made much difference to his political fortunes.

The Conservative Party is adept at chameleon-like reinvention – after all, we’ve seen a succession of Tory prime ministers defining themselves against the record of their immediate predecessor. But that strategy began to collide with its own contradictions.

Was Rishi Sunak seeking to own the long Conservative stint in office, or distance himself from it? How many of the myriad challenges the UK faces could realistically be blamed on any other party?

Read Chris Mason's full piece here.

We're nearly there. With just a day to go before the polls open, candidates are out in force across the country making their final pitches to you.

Stay with us throughout the day for the latest news and analysis.

Three central truths lie at the heart of this campaignpublished at 22:17 2 July

22:17 2 July

Chris Mason
Political editor

We are now into the knowingly masochistic last 48 hours of hurtling around the UK.

Rishi Sunak was at a supermarket distribution centre the wrong side of 05:00 this morning.

Sir Keir Starmer was on a three-county dash this afternoon taking in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire.

The Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey is turning the embarrassing dad routine into a professional artform, of sorts. Surfing, dominos and a bungee jump - and that’s just yesterday and today.

There are three central truths of this campaign.

First, there’s been next to no change in the huge lead Labour have over the Conservatives in the polls.

Second, the noisy arrival of Nigel Farage has heightened already perilous danger for countless Conservatives.

And third, a pervasive mood of discontent hangs over so much of the electorate.

The Conservatives expect to lose. Labour expects to win. The power to decide what actually happens lies with you.

• The Conservatives' Rishi Sunak said he was "fighting" for every vote, as the Tories continue to warn of the dangers of a Labour landslide. At a late-night rally, he said the election was not a "foregone conclusion"
• Labour leader Keir Starmer said a big majority for Labour would be "better for the country," as it would give him a mandate to "seriously change" the country. He was also pressed on prison overcrowding, pensioners' tax, and immigration in a BBC interview
• SNP leader and Scottish First Minister John Swinney urged his party's supporters to turn out on Thursday, adding some races with Scottish Labour could be decided by a "handful of votes"

• Lib Dem leader Ed Davey took a surf lesson in Cornwall in his latest election stunt, as he toured target seats in south-west England where he said the Tories had "taken voters for granted"
• Reform UK candidate Georgie David suspended her campaign and defected to the Conservatives, adding the “vast majority” of her fellow candidates in the party are “racist, misogynistic and bigoted”. Reform leader Nigel Farage rejected this, but admitted his party had had "teething problems" with selecting candidates because it was a "start up"
• Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said his is the only party setting out an alternative vision on tax and that Labour has been too timid over the issue

We're going to pause our live coverage shortly, but we'll leave you with a few words from our political editor Chris Mason.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak takes to the stage after the warm-up act by Boris Johnson.

"Now is the time for all Conservatives to come together to deny Labour that supermajority that Keir Starmer craves," he says.

"We have 48 hours to save Britain from the danger of a Labour government," he continues.

He takes aim at the local Labour leaders in London, Birmingham and Wales, saying the country must not "sleepwalk" into a Labour government in Westminster.

Many people think the election is a "foregone conclusion", Sunak says, "but I know that it is not."

Former prime minister and ex-Tory leader Boris Johnson has just appeared at a campaign rally for the Conservatives in London.

He endorses Rishi Sunak to remain as prime minister, and says the differences they may have are "utterly trivial in comparison with the disaster we may faces if the opinion polls are right".

It's the first in-person event we've seen Johnson at in this campaign.

The former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has launched a scathing attack on the Conservatives' election campaign and the party’s record in government.

In an article for the Daily Telegraph, external, she says the election is “over” and will be followed by a fight for the soul of the Conservative Party “that will determine whether it continues to exist at all”.

Braverman, who was sacked by Rishi Sunak, says that although Sunak was right to call out a Reform UK activist for racism, his claim to be hurt and angry looked less powerful when the Conservatives had previously taken money from a donor who made offensive comments about Labour's Diane Abbott. Braverman says those remarks were “glossed over in the name of filling our party coffers”.

The former home secretary has been critical of Rishi Sunak before but the timing of her intervention – 36 hours before the polls open - is breath-taking.

Braverman – who is a Tory candidate – says her party is haemorrhaging votes largely to Reform because it failed, among other things, to cut immigration or tax. The “Reform phenomenon”, she writes, is entirely predictable and avoidable – “and entirely our own fault”.

The Conservative Party has yet to respond to her comments.

As polling day is just two days away, political posts are popping up across social media - some accurate, others false and misleading.

How can you decode what’s being pushed to your feeds this general election?

Our disinformation and social media correspondent Marianna Spring has some top tips in this two-minute video. Take a look:

On the latest Electioncast, Chris Mason has been hitting the campaign trail - hard.

With the messages from the main party leaders being all too familiar, Chris explains how he used football to try and draw out something new in his interviews with them.

Plus we trade tips about how to carry a tripod after footage of him doing it on the news went viral on social media.

It was all getting a bit too political for this policy nerd, so we dived into the BBC's Your Voice, Your Vote project to find out what subjects voters really care about and then focused on your number one - the challenges facing the NHS.

This also gave me the chance to confess that we journalists often find it easier to focus on big things like the headline rates of tax or the parties' fiscal rules rather than the complexities of real life.

• Have a listen to the latest Electioncast here

Are hotels for asylum seekers costing £8m a day?published at 20:22 2 July

20:22 2 July

By Lucy Gilder

In his BBC interview today, Keir Starmer said hotel bills for asylum seekers are “running into £8m a day”.

That figure comes from the latest Home Office accounts from September 2023., external

But the number of people in hotels – and the number of hotels accommodating them – has been falling.

There were nearly 36,000 asylum seekers staying in UK hotels at the end of March 2024, according to Home Office figures, external. This is down by a fifth from the end of last year, when nearly 46,000 were staying in hotels.

The Home Office also said, external in April that 150 asylum hotels would be closed by the start of May.

Labour says it would end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers “within 12 months” if it won power by setting up a new returns unit for “safe countries” and by hiring more caseworkers to clear the backlog of asylum claims.

• The BBC's television coverage of results night starts at 21:55 BST on BBC One and the BBC News Channel, hosted by Clive Myrie and Laura Kuenssberg.
• There will also be dedicated results programmes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
• Nick Robinson and Henry Zeffman will be helming through-the-night radio coverage on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live.
• The Newcast team will be hosting 150 listeners at the BBC's London HQ through the night and bringing viewers across all platforms their thoughts, before an election morning special is released on Friday
• And of course, we'll be bringing you all the latest news, reaction and analysis here on the BBC News website all through the small hours and into the days ahead

You can find the details in full here.

Image source, PA Media

Earlier today, Scottish Labour leader rejected a call for his party to back the SNP to beat the Tories in one seat.

Anas Sarwar dismissed the suggestion just hours after SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn urged Labour to back its candidate to defeat outgoing Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross in the Aberdeenshire North and Moray East constituency.

Flynn wants Sarwar to back SNP candidate Seamus Logan after Labour's candidate in the constituency, Andy Brown, was suspended by the party over reports of controversial social media posts - which Brown denies making.

During a visit to Inverclyde, Sarwar insisted that he wanted people to vote Scottish Labour, adding that the seat in question is a "specific issue" due to Brown's suspension.

Later, SNP Leader John Swinney said Sarwar would "rather have a Tory than the SNP" in the seat.

• The full list of candidates for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East constituency is here

Will people pay tax on the state pension under Labour?published at 19:23 2 July

19:23 2 July

by Ben King

In his interview earlier, Sir Keir Starmer was asked by BBC political editor Chris Mason: "Will people pay income tax on the state pension under Labour?"

"The position for pensioners in relation to tax will be exactly as it is now," Starmer replied.

"That could mean yes, couldn’t it, in future?" Mason asked.

"That is the position set out in the last Budget under this government and that will remain the position," Starmer said.

BBC Verify has looked at this issue before. The position after the last Budget was that pensioners relying solely on the state pension were on course to potentially pay income tax in 2027-28, because the state pension in that year (£12,578) is forecast to marginally overtake the tax-free personal allowance (£12,570).

But at the end of May, the Conservatives pledged to raise this personal allowance for pensioners only to £13,710 by 2027-28 to protect them from paying this tax on their state pensions.

The policy is called "triple lock plus" and, in his BBC interview, the Labour leader did not commit to match it.

As we approach polling day there are some signs that the polls may have narrowed a little but Labour still has a commanding lead.

Polls published in the last few days have tended to show the Conservatives up a bit and Labour and Reform UK down slightly, compared to previous polls published by the same companies.

There haven't been very many polls though so it's too early to be sure that there's been a significant change. And Labour still has a very large lead overall.

It's likely there will be a rush of polls on Wednesday - so it will be interesting to see whether they also suggest a slight tightening in the race.

• Use our interactive poll tracker here to check the latest trends

We can bring you a little more from the Lib Dem campaign now, which has been focusing on sewage today.

It's been a vintage week so far for leader Sir Ed Davey, who's managed to pack bungee jumping, dominoes and surfing into the last 48 hours.

The latter took place this afternoon at the Big Blue Surf School in Bude, Cornwall - the highlights have been clipped up below:

Image source, Wajad Burkey

A Workers Party of Britain candidate says he was "fearful for his life" after his son was attacked while canvassing for him.

Wajad Burkey, the party’s general election candidate for Sutton Coldfield, says his son had a head injury after being "beaten up" and was being treated in hospital. He has suspended his campaign.

West Midlands Police said a man was attacked by a group with a baseball bat on Beaconsfield Road in Sutton Coldfield on Sunday.

“I have suspended my campaign as I am fearful frankly for my life,” Burkey said in a statement issued by the party.

You can read our story here.

• A full list of candidates standing in Sutton Coldfield is available here

Tory MP and former attorney general Geoffrey Cox says his party's criticism of Sir Keir Starmer over his work-life balance comments are "campaign froth".

As we've been reporting, the Labour leader has faced a backlash for saying he has tried in the past to finish work at 6pm on Friday in order to spend time with his family.

Appearing on the BBC News Channel earlier, Cox also called Starmer's comments a "non-story".

However, he was keen to criticise Labour for running what he called a "submarine campaign" in which he says it has not been explicit about what its policies are.

You can find out more about the policies of all the major parties here.

After almost six weeks of campaigning, polling stations open in less than 48 hours.

With the clock ticking, the parties have been making the most of their final few moments campaigning.

Here are the highlights:

• Keir Starmer has told the BBC early prison releases would likely continue if Labour formed a government, saying he can't magic up a new prison on his first day

• Elsewhere, a second Reform UK candidate, Georgie David, has defected to the Conservatives, calling "the vast majority" of party nominees are "racist, misogynistic and bigoted". A spokesperson for the party said they "strongly disagree" with her comments
• While campaigning in the Highlands, Scottish First Minister John Swinney has said the race between SNP and Labour in Scotland is too close to call
• And Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has added dominoes and surfing to his ever-growing list of campaign activities
• Earlier, PM Rishi Sunak told BBC Breakfast that he hasn't given up on victory

• Concerns have been raised over reported delays to postal votes. However, the Royal Mail has said there's "no backlog"

We will bring you more from the campaign trail as it happens.

We just took you through the answers to several key questions we've seen cropping up a lot in the run up to polling day.

Still got a burning question you want answering? Is there an issue you don't think has been looked into enough? Does something need explaining more because it's way too complicated?

Don't be shy, let us know. Find out how you can get in touch with us here.