The Conservatives spent more than £16m on achieving an 80-seat majority in December, including paying for a £500 cab journey from York and £22,000 on fast-food deliveries, official figures show. Data released by the Electoral Commission on Wednesday shows that the party spent £16,486,871 to claim its biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 victory. Each winning seat cost about £200,000. The payments included nearly £6m sending unsolicited material across the country. The party also paid more than £1.6m to CTF, the polling firm set up by the Australian election guru Lynton Crosby. Johnson is a longtime friend of Crosby, who worked on his London mayoral campaigns, and the pair are understood to have talked informally on the phone regularly during his leadership campaign. The Australian strategist and polling expert was a key figure in the general election campaign, despite the two having disagreed over the role of the prime minister’s partner, Carrie Symonds. One notable expense in the newly released data was a £500.80 journey in an Addison Lee taxi from the University of York where the housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, was appearing on BBC One’s Question Time. The destination of the journey is blacked out on the bill. Recording of the programme ended at about 10pm, informed sources said, and other guests were booked minicabs by the BBC or took the train out of York. Jenrick’s office has been approached by the Guardian and asked if he was a passenger in the taxi. Another election expense was for Uber Eats deliveries to campaigners that came to £22,735.14. Those based in Millbank Tower, the campaign headquarters, would regularly order in deliveries of sushi, pizza and beer, one said. The party also spent £458,688 on Twitter graphics and videos from the New Zealand-based PR firm Topham Guerin, which controversially rebranded the Conservatives’ Twitter account as FactCheckUK during the leaders’ debate last November. The picture agency Parsons Media received three payments totalling £44,975 from the Tories. Andrew Parsons of Parsons Media subsequently worked as a photographer for the prime minister, Boris Johnson, at taxpayers’ expense. The party spent £4,471,937 on marketing and canvassing, and £3,011,665 on advertising. A further £529,650 was spent on rallies. Just over £1m was spent with Facebook and another £700,000 was paid to the strategic advisory firm Hanbury Strategy, which is run by the former Vote Leave executive Paul Stephenson. The Tories were fined a record £70,000 in 2017 for making false declarations about their election expenses in 2015, when David Cameron’s party beat Ed Miliband’s Labour party. The commission found the party failed to declare or accurately report more than £275,000 of campaign spending at three byelections in 2014 and at the 2015 general election. The spending return for the UK general election was missing payments worth at least £104,765 and payments worth up to £118,124 were either not reported to the commission or were incorrectly reported by the party. Invoices and receipts were missing for £52,924 worth of payments. Labour’s expenses have yet to be published because its financial submissions to the commission were late owing to the coronavirus outbreak. Official figures show the pro-Corbyn activist group Momentum spent just over £500,000. The report shows that the cost of the SNP campaign was £1,004,952, Plaid Cymru spent £183,914, and the doomed campaign of the Independent Group for Change spent £29,556. The cost of Ukip’s failed general election push was £8,761. The commission said that spending returns for parties who spent over £250,000 at the 2019 general election were due to be reported by June, but due to Covid-19 not all parties – including Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit party – were able to deliver returns before the deadline. Further batches of spending information are expected to be released later.