Conservatives spent £200,000 on each of 80 majority seats won in 2019 election

Boris Johnson at the launch of the Conservative Party’s campaign in Birmingham.

Boris Johnson at the launch of the Conservative Party’s 2019 election campaign in Birmingham

(Image credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

published 7 October 2020

The Conservatives paid £200,000 in campaigning costs for each of the 80 majority seats won by the party in last December general election, newly released data reveals.

In total, the Tories spend £16,486,871 to claim their biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 victory, according to the Electoral Commission. That total included £1,689,000 to CTF Partners, the lobbying firm run by “Australian dark arts specialist” Lynton Crosby’, says Politico London Playbook’s Alex Wickham.

The multimillion investment was less than the amount shelled out on Theresa May’s 2017 general election campaign, however, which cost the party £18.5m.

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And the Conservatives spent just £1m on Facebook advertising for last year’s vote - less than half what they handed over to the platform in the previous election.

Five reasons the Tories won the election How Brexit conflict turned the clock back a year for Boris Johnson Tories fined record £70,000 over election expenses

Boris Johnson’s team also spent £458,688 on Twitter graphics and videos from New Zealand-based PR firm Topham Guerin, which controversially rebranded the Conservative’s Twitter account as FactCheckUK during the leader’s debate last November.

And £700,000 was handed over to strategic advisory firm Hanbury Strategy, co-founded by ex-Vote Leave communications director Paul Stephenson.

No details of Labour’s spending has been published yet, although Politico’s Wickham “imagines the full figures will be released by the Electoral Commission imminently”.

In 2017, the Tories were fined a record £70,000 for making false declarations about their election expenses during the 2015 general election, which saw David Cameron defeating Ed Miliband’s Labour.

The Tories recorded thousands of pounds spent on a battle bus as national spending when it was actually used to re-elect specific MPs, as The Guardian reported at the time.

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Joe Evans is the world news editor at TheWeek.co.uk. He joined the team in 2019 and held roles including deputy news editor and acting news editor before moving into his current position in early 2021. He is a regular panellist on The Week Unwrapped podcast, discussing politics and foreign affairs.

Before joining The Week, he worked as a freelance journalist covering the UK and Ireland for German newspapers and magazines. A series of features on Brexit and the Irish border got him nominated for the Hostwriter Prize in 2019. Prior to settling down in London, he lived and worked in Cambodia, where he ran communications for a non-governmental organisation and worked as a journalist covering Southeast Asia. He has a masterâ€™s degree in journalism from City, University of London, and before that studied English Literature at the University of Manchester.