May’s ex chief of staff blames election guru Sir Lynton Crosby for poll disaster

‘On the advice of campaign consultants... we eschewed our instincts. We were wrong to do so’

THERESA MAY’S former chief of staff Nick Timothy has criticised the party’s election adviser Sir Lynton Crosby for allegedly persuading the Prime Minister to run a presidential-style campaign against her own instincts.

Mr Timothy said that Conservatives were “wrong” to take advice to put all their efforts into promoting Mrs May as an individual, rather than running a traditional campaign with regular press conferences featuring a range of senior figures.

Mr Timothy, who quit Downing Street after the election, accepted that the much-criticised manifesto which he co-authored and which included highly controversial proposals on the funding of social care, “might have been too ambitious”.

But he said his “biggest regret” was that the Tories did not campaign on Mrs May’s vision of social change.

Writing in The Spectator, Mr Timothy revealed that Sir Lynton remained confident of a comfortable Tory majority right up to the release of the shock exit poll last Thursday evening, which showed the Conservatives would not only shed MPS but also lose overall control of the House of Commons.

“Nobody inside CCHQ was prepared for election night’s 10pm exit poll,” he wrote, adding that Sir Lynton had texted earlier to say that the Tories would “do well”.

Mr Timothy said: “Because this election failed to produce the majority we needed, it is impossible to call the campaign anything but a failure. Before it began, we envisaged a return to traditional campaigning methods, with daily press conferences to scrutinise Labour and promote our policies.

“Theresa, never comfortable hogging the limelight, expected to make more use of her ministerial team.

“On the advice of the campaign consultants, and following opinion research that showed Theresa to be far more popular than the party or her colleagues, we eschewed our instincts. We were wrong to do so.”

Mr Timothy defended Conservative manifesto proposals to make the elderly pay for social care from the value of their homes after their death, insist- ing it was neither “sustainable (nor) socially just” to expect younger generations to meet the bills of older people with assets.

He said he had faced criticism for using the manifesto to spell out where cuts would fall, rather than offering voters “bribes and giveaways”.

He said: “The manifesto was later written off as ‘the worst in history’. One of the criticisms is that, instead of offering voters giveaways and bribes, we spelt out where cuts would fall.

“While I accept that the manifesto might have been too ambitious, I worry that the implication of this argument is that politicians should not be straight with the electorate.”

The Conservative Party and Sir Lynton both declined to comment.