The former prime minister, who turned 60 on Wednesday, is expected to go on his second summer holiday this year within the next few days and return on 3 July,The Times reported.

Despite endorsing 50 Tory candidates across the country, Johnson is no longer expected to join the Tories on the doorstep due to the party facing decimation in red wall seats he won in 2019.

It comes as a new poll found more than half of the UK public thinks Reform UK leader Nigel Farage would make a bad or terrible prime minister.

A YouGov survey found 55 per cent of Britons thought Mr Farage would make a bad (12 per cent) or terrible prime minister (43 per cent) a day after he unveiled his party’s manifesto.

Only 27 per cent thought he would make a great (nine per cent) or good (18 per cent) leader, with 65 per cent saying they did not believe Mr Farage would become prime minister in the next ten years.

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Labour would use part of NHS budget to buy beds in care homes

NHS money will be used to buy thousands of beds in care homes under Labour plans to reduce overcrowding in England’s hospitals, long waits in A&E and patients becoming trapped in ambulances.

Denis Campbell www.theguardian.com

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said the move would tackle the huge human and financial “waste” of beds being occupied by patients fit to leave but stuck there because a lack of care outside the hospital. There are 13,000 beds in England – enough to fill 26 hospitals – being occupied by such patients.

If Labour wins the general election on 4 July it will funnel some of the NHS’s £165bn budget into the plan as one of a series of immediate changes intended to relieve the crisis in the health service.

Streeting made clear in a speech that a Labour government would expect hospitals across England to follow the example of Leeds teaching hospitals NHS trust, which spends £9m a year buying up care home beds in order to cut delayed discharges and free up beds.

That initiative – which it launched as a way of avoiding a “winter crisis” in 2022-23 – has freed up 165 beds, helped reduce the number of patients who are admitted avoidably and saved the trust between £17m and £23m, it has estimated.

“We will learn from the great innovations already happening in the health service like this, and take the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS,” said Streeting, who cited the Leeds approach as a model to follow when speaking to members of the Medical Journalists’ Association.

“I went to St Mary’s hospital in Paddington [in London] this month, where a patient had been stuck in hospital for 60 days despite being well enough to leave, because the care wasn’t available. Not only is that a waste of that patient’s time and life, it is a waste of taxpayers’ money.

“The number of patients in hospital beds per day unable to be discharged because of a lack of care in the community could fill 26 hospitals. The price of that failure is £1.7bn a year.

“Labour will get more hospitals doing what Leeds teaching hospitals are already doing, investing in local social care beds to discharge patients faster – better for patients and less expensive for taxpayers.”

The 13,000 beds being occupied by patients who are fit to leave hospital represent one in seven of the health service’s entire bed stock.

However, speaking anonymously, one senior NHS figure questioned how the NHS in England could afford to buy care home beds to emulate what Leeds has done given that it is on track to end 2024-25 with a £3bn deficit.

A&E doctors welcomed the move. If the scheme is rolled out as Streeting hopes, it could unblock hospitals struggling with the sheer number of patients they are caring for and mean ambulances arrive more quickly after a 999 call and that people no longer end up stuck on trolleys or enduring “corridor care”, they said.

“We are supportive of the plan for NHS hospitals to buy up social care beds,” said Dr Adrian Boyle, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.

“About 13,000 people are currently in our acute hospitals awaiting some form of social care. Anything that can reduce this terrible total can only be a good thing, for patients and the running of our hospitals.

“If this works, this could be very helpful in tackling all of the problems in the urgent and emergency care pathway, from the first time someone calls 999, to them arriving at the hospital, being handed over to the emergency department and ending up in the main hospital.”

The Leeds trust estimates that the proportion of inpatients it was able to discharge in less than 27 days rose from 21% to 38% as a direct result of spending millions on care home beds.

Sally Warren, director of policy at the King’s Fund thinktank, said: “NHS and social care operate as part of one interconnected system. When one bit of the system is under pressure, the long waits can back up elsewhere.

“Perhaps the most visible example is when a lack of community or social care support stops people from being discharged out of hospital, which in turn means there is no space for new patients to be admitted to hospital, and we all see the results with long queues of ambulances at A&E each winter.

But, she added: “Let’s not confuse this approach [in Leeds] with a plan to solve all of the issues in social care. It’s primarily an initiative to improve patient flow through hospitals and will not solve the fundamental mismatch between demand for and supply of publicly funded social care in England.”

Streeting’s idea is not new. The Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England have made money available to health trusts in recent years to buy care home beds to head off the service’s annual “winter crisis”.

Dr Tim Cooksley, the immediate past president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said that while it was “pleasing that Wes Streeting is recognising this issue and considering solutions … the focus should be on ensuring high-quality community care beds with expert rehabilitation teams as that would be a valuable addition to the care for older people.

“Buying extra nursing home beds will, in isolation, not stop corridor care or improve outcomes for older people. Moving older people around the care system to the wrong place is simply like moving the deckchairs on the Titanic: it doesn’t help them and won’t stop the overcrowding that leaves so many languishing in emergency care corridors,” he added.

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Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson set to win seats in new Ipsos MRP poll

Nigel Farage is set to win in his constituency of Clacton, Essex, according to fresh predictions from pollster Ipsos.

Alicja Hagopian www.independent.co.uk

The projections show Mr Farage at 52 per cent, far ahead of the next candidate, Labour’s Jovan Owusu-Nepaul at 24 per cent.

The model is the first research of its kind to be carried out entirely after Mr Farage announced that he would return to Reform UK as party leader, and run for candidate. Tory defector Lee Anderson is also estimated to hold his seat in Ashfield.

The model also projects that Jeremy Corbyn may lose his seat in Islington North after 41 years of being an MP. Labour is estimated at 54 per cent of the vote in the constituency, with candidate Praful Nargund, while Mr Corbyn may be at just 13 per cent.

Head of politics at Ipsos Gideon Skinner explained that projections can be affected by a variety of factors, and are riskier with high-profile candidates:

“Is it the question of Jeremy Corbyn losing, or is it more a question of just Labour holding off in Islington? It may be that there is identity with Labour there, even if there is also support for Jeremy Corbyn as an individual candidate.”

He added that the methodology he used “is good at making estimates based on the demographic characteristics of each individual constituency. But it’s not so good at picking up very unique political, local dynamics.”

“We make some efforts in areas where we know there are high-profile independents, we’ve made some changes to the approach to take that into account a bit more, but even so, that’s not going to pick up the full picture of everything.

This is the latest projection using multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) polling, a relatively new type of polling, to show that Labour will likely win a strong majority. Sir Keir Starmer’s party is on track to win an average of 453 seats, ranging between 439 and 462.

The projections suggest that Labour will see the most substantial leaps in Scotland and the North East, as well as winning seats in Wales thanks to the declining Tory vote.

Meanwhile, just 115 seats have been projected for the Tories; a loss of 225 constituencies for the party. This could go as low as 99 seats, or as high as just 123, with sharp drops in the East, South, and the Midlands.

The large-scale survey is of 19,000 people, and population data on local constituency levels.

Top Tory cabinet ministers are at high risk of losing their spots in parliament, with Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt and Jacob Rees-Mogg among those projected to lose on 4 July.

Meanwhile Jeremy Hunt, who has poured £100,000 of his own money into his fight for re-election, still faces an uncertain future. The former chancellor is just 1 point ahead (34 per cent) of the Lib Dems (33 per cent) in his newly-formed constituency of Godalming and Ash.

Reform is also leading by a small margin in North West Leicestershire, with candidate Noel Matthews projected at 35 per cent.

The Conservative majority in the constituency has crumbled since former Tory MP Andrew Bridgen was expelled last year, after comparing Covid to the Holocaust. Mr Bridgen then joined Reclaim Party, before quitting at the end of 2023.

The right-wing challenger party Reform is currently coming in second in 30 constituencies. At the highest end of the spectrum, Ipsos projects that the party could win up to 10 seats.

Around 1 in 5 seats (117 overall) have been deemed “too close to call”, with a projected winning margin of under 5 per cent. These include Salisbury, North Devon, and Torbay.

The Lib Dems are projected to win an average of 38 seats, which could increase to 48 seats on the highest estimates. This is s sharp increase from the 8 seats which they won in the 2019 general election. The party is set to gain at least 20 seats from the Tories.

Though the Green Party are looking to make headwinds, winning party leader Carla Denyer’s constituency of Bristol Central, Ipsos projects that they may lose their only existing seat in Brighton Pavilion where Caroline Lucas has been elected since 2010.

The current projections show musician Tom Gray leading by 17 points for Labour, at 54 per cent. However, there are more positives in sight for the party, which has historically struggled to translate national vote share into seats; the Greens are currently on track to win in North Herefordshire, and are neck-in-neck in Waveney.