London: The head of the Czech secret service archives says there is no evidence to back up claims aired in the British right-wing press that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was a paid Soviet spy.

London’s Daily Mail and Telegraph reported sensational allegations – first aired in the Sun newspaper – that Corbyn collaborated with the now-defunct Czechoslovak communist secret service, the Statni Bezpecnost (StB), in the 1980s.

Britain's Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn during general election in London in June. Credit:AP

Saturday’s Daily Mail front page reported that Corbyn was a “paid informant of the Czech secret police at the height of the Cold War”, and the Telegraph said Corbyn supplied information to a man he knew was a spy.

Both newspapers based their reports on interviews with a man that Corbyn admits meeting: Jan Sarkocy, a former StB agent who had been posted as a Czech diplomat in London, but was expelled by the Thatcher government in 1989.