A Tory MP has defended a government adviser after claims she invoked future press regulation to suppress a newspaper's coverage of Culture Secretary Maria Miller's expenses.
The Daily Telegraph has released a recording in which the adviser mentions the Leveson Inquiry while being asked by a journalist about Mrs Miller.
But MP Therese Coffey said Mrs Miller's elderly parents had been "doorstepped".
She said adviser Joanna Hindley was just suggesting that was inappropriate.
The release of the Telegraph's recording, which dates from December 2012, comes at the end of a week in which Mrs Miller was told to repay £5,800 in mortgage interest claims and apologise to Parliament for failing to co-operate with a parliamentary inquiry.
'Flag up'In the recording, Miss Hindley is answering a query from a Telegraph reporter when she points out that another reporter from the paper had "doorstepped" Mrs Miller's father, who had just come out of hospital.
She goes on to say Mrs Miller had been "having quite a lot of editors' meetings around Leveson at the moment", before adding: "So I am just going to flag up that connection for you to think about."
In its leader column, the Daily Telegraph says that referring to Mrs Miller's involvement in deciding press legislation in order to convince it to back away from getting "straight answers" was "an indictment of the influence that press regulation by statute could have over free speech".
It adds: "If our MPs cannot hold an honest conversation about regulation of their own expenditure, how can we expect them to hold an honest conversation about the maintenance of the free press."
But Ms Coffey, who sat on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee between 2010 and 2012, told BBC Two's Newsnight that she had heard the recording and believed the special adviser had been trying to protect Mrs Miller's elderly parents from press intrusion.
She said: "I heard an adviser to the culture secretary suggesting that it's inappropriate to be doorstepping elderly parents of somebody who has just come out of hospital."
Earlier David Cameron's official spokesman, Craig Oliver, had denied claims he had "threatened" the former editor of the Telegraph over the Leveson Inquiry in relation to the story.
Dr Coffey said: "The issue about Leveson has been going on for some time, but I have not seen any change in newspapers' attitudes in wanting to publish what they wish."
Freedom of information campaigner Heather Brooke said the Telegraph reporter who had visited the house had been carrying out "a public interest piece of reporting".
The paper reported in December 2012 that Mrs Miller had claimed £90,000 in expenses towards the mortgage on the south London property where her parents lived, while designating her main home as a rented property in her constituency of Basingstoke.
Ms Brooke said that the journalist had no choice but to visit the property to establish the facts of who was living there and that it was "disingenuous to use this argument of privacy".
PM's backingThe BBC's political reporter Alan Soady said the camps in the row were developing, with some people suspecting there had been "some bullying going on" in reaction to scrutiny of Mrs Miller's expenses.
But he suggested that plenty of Conservative MPs and others wondered if the ongoing row was the result of newspapers with a "vendetta" getting their own back for Mrs Miller's role in press regulation after the Leveson Inquiry into press conduct.
She currently has Prime Minister David Cameron's backing - on Friday he told reporters to "leave it there" with questions on Ms Miller, who has accepted committee findings into her expenses claims and apologised.
But with various strands of the story ongoing, her position could depend on how long it lasted, our reporter added.
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