Theresa May paid her election guru’s firm the equivalent of £85,000 a day for the Conservatives Party’s 2017 general election campaign, according to reports.

Mrs May and the Tories reportedly forked out about £4million to Sir Lynton Crosby’s CTF Partners firm for work done in the run up to June 8.

Sir Lynton, nicknamed the Wizard of Oz, returned to the Tories for the 2017 campaign having helped David Cameron, Mrs May’s predecessor as Prime Minister, to win an overall majority in 2015.

This year's election campaign lasted for 47 days which means the Tories spent somewhere in the region of £85,000 a day with the firm.

Theresa May, the Prime Minister credit: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP

However, it is understood that the vast majority of the money was spent on things like polling, focus groups, data analysis and call centres with only a small portion of the cash going on advice.

A Tory source told The Sun: “It was easily £4million and when the final invoices are totted up it could be much more."

Meanwhile, it is also understood that some of the money was used to populate the campaign team with up to 25 people because the election was called at short notice.

Mrs May’s former chief of staff Nick Timothy took aim at Sir Lynton in the wake of the election after the Prime Minister lost her majority and was forced to do a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party to prop up her minority government.

Nick Timothy, Theresa May's former chief of staff credit: Dominic Lipinski/PA

Mr Timothy criticised Sir Lynton for advising the Prime Minister to run a presidential-style campaign against her own instincts.

Describing the widely-mocked campaign as a "failure", 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 the day after the election, accepted that the much-criticised Conservative manifesto which he co-authored with minister Ben Gummer, and which included highly controversial proposals on the funding of social care, "might have been too ambitious".

CTF Partners and the Conservative Party have both been contacted for comment.