“Extremist” right-wing rag the Mail on Sunday was condemned yesterday for a politically motivated stunt in which it paid a sneak reporter to lie to a food bank and claim food he was not entitled to.

The tabloid, which infamously supported Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 1930s, sent one hack posing as a benefit claimant to a Citizen’s Advice Bureau (CAB) in Nottingham, where he obtained vouchers for use at the local Trussell Trust-run food bank.

The paper said other undercover reporters had posed as volunteers at two trust-run food banks in Nottingham and London.

The trust, a charity, runs about 400 such sites across Britain providing the most vulnerable with desperately needed foodstuffs and other essentials.

The MoS suggested that fraudsters regularly exploit the banks and that in some cases basic checks for eligibility were not carried out before food was handed over.

However the paper’s disgraceful trick triggered an outpouring of support for the trust, with donations to its Easter campaign nearing £19,000 as the Star went to press.

Left-Labour MP Ian Lavery said the MoS stunt “beggared belief.”

“These extremists, because that’s what they are, seem to believe access to food banks should be means-tested. Can you imagine how people using food banks feel?

“These are people who are desperate and have no food to put on the table for their families. These charities are doing a fantastic job helping people in these most desperate of times,” he said.

“The Mail on Sunday should be thoroughly ashamed.

“Food banks are a last resort and these people seem to be saying ‘it’s easy.’ What more do they want? To humiliate people? It is totally outrageous.”

Bernadette Horton, a mother of four from north Wales, accused the paper of a “disgusting piece of propaganda,” “lazy journalism” and wasting the time and resources of the CAB and food banks by “claiming food under false pretences.”

She said: “It alarms me because the trust may feel that they have to make it harder for people to access food banks.

“The referral process is hard enough already. In my community I know of very vulnerable and elderly people who are already slipping through the net.”

The Mail unsurprisingly laid the blame for the growing use of food banks on “scroungers” and asylum-seekers, its usual targets.

But Ms Horton was in no doubt where the blame lay — Tory policy.

“They haven’t gone away and it’s only getting worse,” she said. “It all comes back to Number 10.”