A senior London Tory has described how the Conservative campaign machine had ordered him to spend election day urging Labour supporters to vote.

Daniel Moylan is a former deputy leader of Kensington and Chelsea council and a former adviser to Boris Johnson. He said the Tory team in Brentford and Isleworth, where Labour had a majority of only 465, had to ignore its own accurate canvass returns in favour of “completely wrong” and “idiotic” target voter lists from Conservative national office.

“We spent polling day knocking up socialists. We were given a list of specific voters to deliver our ‘Have you voted?’ leaflets to and the addresses were ones which we had already canvassed as socialist. Some of them actually had Labour posters up in