Clare Short has become the first cabinet minister to say Labour should not have accepted a donation from soft pornography publisher Richard Desmond.

Her comments on BBC One's Question Time programme come a week after Prime Minister Tony Blair defended the decision to take the money.

I do think that the committee has been established because of the embarrassment over that affair

Clare Short

Ms Short also, however, accused the media of wrongly suggesting there was corruption in all gifts.

On Tuesday, Labour set up a new committee to vet future donations but denied the move was sparked by the controversy over Mr Desmond's gift.

But Ms Short said: "I do think that the committee has been established because of the embarrassment over that affair."

The �100,000 gift from Mr Desmond, who owns magazines like Asian Babes and Horny Housewives as well as Express Newspapers, angered some Labour rank-and-file members.

'I hate porn'

On Thursday's programme, Ms Short was asked by David Dimbleby: "Do you think it was right that Richard Desmond's money was accepted?"

The minister replied: "No. I hate porn, though if you look at the list of the 10 richest men in Britain, four or five made their money from porn.

Clare Short is known for speaking her mind

"It's a kind of rather horrible reflection on how much consumption of it there is."

Ms Short said she was proud of some of the moves her party her made on political funding, such as introducing transparency and national limits.

The public should not be asked to give more state funding to political parties, she argued.

"We have got to try to reduce what we spend on politics and keep our politics as clean as possible," Ms Short continued.

Cutting innuendo

"I think this committee has been established to try to be more ethical about what the Labour Party accepts.

"We are in a dilemma here. We have opened it up and now everyone thinks everything we do is absolutely grotty - and it's not - but we will have to go on and do better."

Labour says its new committee is designed to cut out the "innuendo" which has surrounded recent donations but denies any past wrongdoing.

The new six-member fundraising committee will oversee any gift of more than �5,000.

Democratic rights

Labour chairman Charles Clarke on Tuesday declined to say whether the committee would have accepted Mr Desmond donations.

But he admitted Labour had been put onto the "back foot" by recent funding rows.

"The most important moral standard is that people should not expect that in giving money to the Labour Party they are getting some favour in return," said Mr Clarke.

That included people looking for honours and government contracts, he said.

Mr Clarke said Labour was not going to draw up a list of types of organisations from whom it will not accept money.

Instead, the committee would decide on each donation on a case by case basis.

Dracula analogy

The Conservatives have instead called for an independent commission to examine claims of corruption in government.

Labour fundraiser Lord Levy, Mr Blair's special envoy, is to be one of the committee's members.

On Question Time, Tory education spokesman Damian Green described that move as like putting "Dracula in charge of the blood transfusion service".

In a Newsnight interview this month Mr Blair said he was not familiar with the content of the magazines owned by Mr Desmond's Northern and Shell company.

But if someone was fit to own one of Britain's biggest newspaper groups, there was no reason why Labour should not take their money, he said.