Rich donors hand Tories £5.5m election funding boost

The Conservatives have been handed a big funding boost in the first week of the election campaign after receiving large donations worth 26 times the amount received by Labour.

Boris Johnson’s party raised more than £5.67m in large donations – defined as amounts of more than £7,500 – compared to £218,500 given to Labour, according to official figures.

Tory donors included the wife of a Russian businessman, property developers and a theatre producer. They contributed to a £1.5m increase in the amount raised by the Conservatives from large donors over the same period in 2017.

Related: A girls’ night out with the PM and her posse for £135,000? Bargain

Figures released by the Electoral Commission showed that the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit party both raised more than Labour, with £275,000 and £250,000 each.

In total, £6,507,146 in donations was reported to the elections watchdog between 6 and 12 November. This was more than £500,000 less than for the same period in 2017.

Most of the donations to Labour come in smaller amounts from individuals and are not required to be registered by the elections watchdog.

Tory donors included in the new data include Lubov Chernukhin, whose husband Vladimir was formerly a minister in the government of President Vladimir Putin. He has subsequently said he has fallen out with the Russian leader.

Related: Calls for inquiry into claims Johnson backers benefit from no-deal Brexit

This time, she has donated £200,000 as a cash donation. Previously, she had successfully bid at Tory auctions to spend time with senior Tories including a £160,000 bid to play tennis with Boris Johnson and later paid £135,000 for a night out with Theresa May and other senior cabinet ministers.

In 2018, the Conservatives accepted her bid of £30,000 in return for a private dinner with defence secretary Gavin Williamson in the Churchill War Rooms.

The biggest backer of the Conservatives was the theatre producer John Gore, who gave £1m.

The next three largest donors were the travel company Trailfinders, Countrywide Developers and WA Capital, who each gave £500,000 pounds to the party. Countrywide Developers is owned by the property billionaire Tony Gallagher.

Gore, who grew up in Southport, Merseyside, has an estimated wealth of £1.5bn made by staging musicals such as Hamilton, Wicked, Chicago and School of Rock.

He told the Sunday Times in May that he began donating to the Conservatives in 2017 because he wishes to stop “extreme demagogues” from achieving power. “It’s not unlike being a director. I can see this show is really going wrong – that it’s going to crash,” he said.

Other Tory donors include Malcolm Offord, a private equity tycoon who spent 16 years at the buyout firm Charterhouse before retiring at the end of 2013.

A firm led by the Ukrainian-born businessman Alexander Temerko, Aquind Ltd, gave two donations to the Tories worth a total of £67,000. Earlier this week, the company submitted plans for a privately funded £1.1bn electricity link between the UK and France.

Jeremy Corbyn has used the Tories’ reliance upon wealthy donors as a rallying cry among his supporters. “A third of Britain’s billionaires have donated to the Conservative Party,” he told activists on Thursday.

Unite the union has given five separate donations to Labour totalling £213,000, making it the party’s largest donor.

A Labour spokesman said: “While the Conservative party is in the pockets of vested interests and the super-rich, we are proud that the Labour party is funded by hundreds of thousands of people donating what they can afford.”