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Live: MPs debate oversight of expenses investigations
Culture Secretary Maria Miller is being "hounded" after overclaiming on her expenses, Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson has said.
On BBC Radio 4, he said his "natural sympathy" went out to her and dismissed speculation about her future in the cabinet, saying: "She is staying."
But the system of investigating MPs' expenses needed reform, he added.
Reports on Mrs Miller have featured on the front pages of the Telegraph and the Times every day since Friday.
Labour MP John Mann, whose formal complaint originally prompted the investigation into Mrs Miller's expenses in December 2012, asked an "urgent question" in the House of Commons on the system of oversight of MPs' expenses.
He said there was "virtual unanimity" among the public that MPs should not regulate their own expenses conduct.
One Conservative minister, Esther McVey, has questioned publicly the way Mrs Miller apologised for breaking the parliamentary code of conduct during the inquiry.
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Mr Johnson, who writes a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph, told the Today programme: "I don't know the facts of the case in great detail but it seems to me she is being hounded quite a lot.
"I suppose my natural sympathy goes out to people being in a hounded situation, how about that? There she is. She's being hounded."
He also said it was "frankly irrelevant" to try to assess the extent to which coverage of the case had politically damaged Prime Minister David Cameron.
The independent parliamentary commissioner for standards, whose job it was to investigate Mrs Miller's expenses, found that she had overclaimed by £45,000.
Although the Commons standards committee, which is the ultimate arbiter, disagreed and decided that she had overclaimed by £5,800, it also criticised her "attitude" to the inquiry, accusing her of supplying the commissioner with "incomplete documentation and fragmentary information".
Mrs Miller was cleared of funding a home for her parents at taxpayers' expense, the central charge against her.
Mr Johnson suggested that the role of the standards committee, which comprises five Conservative MPs, four Labour MPs, one Lib Dem MP and three members of the public, should be reduced.
"The trouble seems to have arisen because you've got some discrepancy between what the independent assessor said and what the committee of MPs said," he explained.
"I think what you need is to sort it out by having a proper independent system of evaluating what is owed and you cannot let the MPs do it themselves.
"'Nemo iudex in causa sua' [no-one should be a judge in their own case] is our motto.
"Let's get on with it and have a proper independent system that everyone can have confidence in."
Previously, Employment Minister Ms McVey had criticised the 32-second apology Mrs Miller made in the Commons on Thursday, saying she would not have said sorry in such a way.
She told ITV's The Agenda: "I can honestly say it wouldn't be how I would have made an apology. But different people have different styles and do things in different ways."
She said: "Fundamentally what we've got to do is make sure the public believe in their representatives, and it is only right for the public and for politics that we get this matter right and we did actually because we changed the system in 2010."
The prime minister "has the final say" on whether Mrs Miller should keep her job, she added.
"He's standing by her. The whole system has changed since 2010 and remember this is pre-2010 - this couldn't happen now," she said.
BBC political correspondent Chris Mason said many Conservative MPs were irritated by Mrs Miller's behaviour, the tone and brevity of her apology and, most of all, a distraction just weeks before the local and European Parliament elections.
Mr Cameron has said he is open to the idea of further reform of the way MPs' expenses and conduct are monitored.
But he has continued to defend Mrs Miller.
Meanwhile, a petition organised by a Labour activist, calling for Mrs Miller to repay £45,000 of expenses or resign, has attracted more than 100,000 signatures.
A Downing Street source said it was for the prime minister to choose his cabinet, and plenty of MPs supported Mrs Miller.
Others who back Mrs Miller believe her roles in negotiating reforms to press regulation after the Leveson Inquiry into media standards and overseeing proposals for same-sex marriage have made her a target for newspapers and some fellow MPs.
'Completely irrational'A poll found that 74% of voters and 69% of Tory supporters thought the prime minister should have sacked Mrs Miller.
The ComRes poll of more than 2,000 people was commissioned by campaign group Conservative Grassroots.
Its chairman Robert Woollard said: "Mr Cameron's support of the culture secretary is completely irrational.
"When David Cameron spoke about the need for the actions of those in Parliament to pass the smell test, it was exactly for such occasions as these. Well, this whole issue stinks and as this poll finds it is incredibly damaging to our party and the PM personally."
Labour has accused Mr Cameron of letting Mrs Miller "off the hook" but has not called for her resignation.
The row over the culture secretary's expenses dates back to December 2012, when the Telegraph reported she had claimed £90,718 in expenses towards mortgage payments on a house in Wimbledon, south-west London, that the MP shared with her parents.
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