Conservative Party sources have insisted “partygate” is not coming up on the doorstep nearly as much as they expected it to as activists campaign for the May elections.

Some Tory leaders outside London said they did not believe the party would be punished at the polls, with strategists setting their sights on taking control of Sunderland City Council for the first time in its 48-year history.

Pollsters Electoral Calculus and Find Out Now have predicted that the Conservatives are on course to lose more than 800 council seats in next month’s local elections.

However, other pollsters have said the findings overstate the scale of any Labour gains, with one Labour MP calling them Tory “expectation management”.

Speaking on ITV’s This Morning, Sir Keir appeared to acknowledge that Downing Street parties are not at the forefront of voters’ minds, saying: “Going into the local elections my focus is actually not on ‘partygate’, it’s on the cost-of-living crisis because that is where – as I go around the country – so many people are saying: ‘I am really struggling.'”

A Labour source said: “We obviously know the cost of living comes up all the time on the doorstep – it genuinely has been a focus for a long time. Certainly you can’t ignore what is happening with the PM, but a lot of the time we are talking about energy bills, the price of fuel – these are bread and butter issues.”