LABOUR leadership favourite Jim Murphy is under fire after benefiting from a £10,000 donation from a one-time Conservative donor.

The SNP said the Blairite MP's acceptance of the money to help run his former office showed he was out of touch with voters and his own party.

According to Electoral Commission records, the money was donated by London-based businessman Alan M Sharr on October 25 last year.

It was given to Labour Party HQ but earmarked for Murphy's office as a shadow secretary of state - he had been appointed to the international development portfolio a fortnight earlier.

Murphy declared the money in his parliamentary register of interests, naming the donor as Alan Sharr, and stating the value as "£10,000 received through the Labour Party to support the Shadow Secretary of State's office".

Other donation records show Alan M Sharr also gave £10,000 to the Conservative Party in June 2001, and £2500 to Michael Portillo's ill-fated Tory leadership campaign the same year.

Sharr's donation to Murphy's office was the largest cash donation ever recorded by the MP. Only a 2012 visit to Australia paid for by the Australian government while Murphy was shadow defence secretary was worth more - at almost £12,400 - but that was not in cash.

Three months ago, Murphy angered many in Labour by appearing with former Scottish Conservative leader Baroness Annabel Goldie in Clydebank, as part of his 100-town independence referendum campaign tour.

Murphy is already facing a ­challenge from Labour's left-wing in the form of MSP Neil Findlay, who has the support of Scotland's biggest unions.

Murphy has represented the former Conservative stonghold of East Renfrewshire since 1997.

Sandra White, the SNP MSP for Glasgow Kelvin, said: "It's one thing to take a seat from the Tories, but quite another for Jim Murphy to take cash from them.

"His difficulty is that he was so associated with Labour being joined at the hip with the Tories in the referendum - the very factor which helps explain why huge numbers of Scots are turning away from Labour and towards the SNP."

Sharr, 68, is a former estate agent, property developer and film producer.

In the 1990s, he was a director of the film and TV distribution company Metrodome, and an executive producer on the British film Clockwork Mice starring Boardwalk Empire actor Ian Hart.

Murphy has also received ­thousands in pounds of ­donations through opaque "fundraising dinners", where individual donors are not usually named.

In 2010, two lots of cash totalling £9849 from a "regional fundraising dinner" were channelled through Murphy's East Renfrewshire Labour Party, according to his register of interests.

In February 2012, when he was shadow defence secretary, a fundraising dinner was held in London to support his work, which generated £13,251, of which only £3450 was attributed to a specific donor, the steel workers' union Community.

Despite the dinner being held in London, the donor's address recorded in Murphy's register of interests was that of his constituency office.

In July 2013, a further fundraising dinner to support his work as shadow defence secretary was held in London, which raised £6846.

No individual donors were named, and the money was again attributed to his constituency office address in Spiersbridge Way, Thornliebank in East Renfrewshire.

When the Sunday Herald tried to contact Sharr, colleagues in London said he was in America and that they would forward messages to him. However, he had not responded by last night.

A spokesman for Murphy said: "For more than a decade Mr Sharr has supported the Labour Party.

"Last year, he made a donation to the UK Labour Party to support Mr Murphy's campaigning and work as shadow secretary of state for defence."