PRAGUE (Reuters) - Jan Kavan, the new Czech foreign minister, is the most controversial appointee to the Social Democrat cabinet named on Wednesday, but controversy is nothing new to the longtime London-based exile. The son of a Czech diplomat born in London, Kavan, now 51, long supported the anti-Communist opposition from Britain through his publishing and other activities. Newly-designated Prime Minister Milos Zeman believes Kavan, a member of the British Labour Party during his 20 years in exile, will be a valuable cabinet member with his international contacts and deep knowledge of European affairs. Kavan has figured in several affairs which critics felt left question marks over his suitability for office. Perhaps the biggest controversy surrounds his contacts with the Czechoslovak secret police in 1969-70 in London, where he moved after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of his homeland which crushed the „Prague Spring“ reforms. Two decades later Kavan was branded a collaborator on the grounds that he had repeatedly met secret agents and divulged information on his colleagues. A long legal battle brought Kavan, who admits he met the agents but was unaware of their secret service involvement, a victory in court but local media still air suspicions about him. While in London, Kavan supported Czech dissidents back home and organised a number of secret shipments of literature into the country. One van shipment, seized by border police in 1981, included a list of dissidents‘ addresses which gave the authorities a new stick with which to beat the opposition. The largest Czech daily, Mlada Fronta Dnes, called Kavan a „convicted liar“, and Kavan recently failed to win a full apology for that statement in a legal battle against the paper. The newspaper was, however, required to apologise for stating that Kavan was „persona non grata“ in Britain. The British Foreign Office released a statement last week, quoted in The Guardian, saying the government „would have no objections to the appointment of Mr. Kavan“. Kavan‘s right-wing opponents say he was „on the wrong side in the most important foreign policy question of the 1980s“ when supporting nuclear disarmament movements in the West. He now supports the Czech entry into NATO but has advocated a referendum on the issue. Early this year, Kavan‘s prospects of winning a cabinet seat looked bleak after he crashed into several cars in central Prague and used his senatorial immunity to escape drink-drive charges. Kavan admitted he had been drinking before the accident but was not drunk. Kavan studied journalism in Prague in the 1960s and became a reformist student leader. After emigrating to Britain in 1969, he graduated in international relations at the London School of Economics and studied history and political science at Reading and Oxford.