REMEMBER that story in the Sunday Times about a “hard left plot to infiltrate [the] Labour race,” which started all the fuss about “entryism,” with tens of thousands of “communists” and “Militant Tendency types” joining Labour to vote for Jeremy Corbyn?

There was no evidence in the piece that this was happening, but the July 26 article started of a whole host of similar stories.

The Sunday Times also persuaded John Mann MP to call for the Labour leadership election to be suspended because it was “totally out of control.”

Well, one odd thing about the story is that it relied on arguments of a millionaire who funds the Tories.

While the Sunday Times could not find any real evidence that “hard-left infiltration is fuelling a huge surge in party membership,” it did pad out the piece with quotes that a Corbyn victory would be a disaster.

Without these quotes, the article would have looked very thin.

A lot of these quotes padding out the fairly fact-free story came from sometime Labour donor, Hull engineering and football millionaire Assem Allam.

After warning of the “hard left plot to infiltrate Labour race,” the Sunday Times added: “The call came as the Labour donor Assem Allam warned that the party would be out of power for at least a decade unless David Miliband returned as leader.”

The Sunday Times reported Allam saying: “The only way I am prepared to accept it will be five years is if David Miliband comes back and wins his seat in a constituency and is elected leader of the party.”

So we jumped from a non-existent “entryists” story to a rich man saying bring-back-David-M.

But the Sunday Times did not say that Allam is himself a Tory donor — it is printing advice from a man who funds the Tories about “entryism” in Labour.

Allam has given Labour about £200k in the past, but his most recent donation was £10k to top Tory David Davis’s election campaign via Allam’s firm, Allamhouse Ltd, on May 8.

Allam’s firm also funds the Conservative Middle East Council, which is run by top Tories like Nicholas Soames and Alan Duncan to bring together Tories with an interest in the region — it is a Conservative Party body.

Allam gave the Middle East Council £15k in May 2015 and £15k in May 2014.

So the biggest proven supporter of other parties in the whole Sunday Times story is actually a sometime Tory donor.