Pressure is mounting on Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith to uphold a claim he made that he could live on just £53 a week in benefits.
In an interview about changes to the welfare system, Mr Duncan Smith suggested he could get by on £53 a week, as one benefit recipient argued they were having to.
"If I had to I would," Mr Duncan Smith told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
The MP is the architect behind controversial reforms that started coming into force this week. He currently has an after-tax income of £1,600 a week.
In the wake of the comment, more than 200,000 people have so far signed a petition on the change.org website, calling for the minister to live up to his claim for a year.
That is more signatures than any other petition that is currently open on the Government's e-petition website.
Dom Aversano, who set up the petition, told Sky News that people felt there was "a gigantic gulf" between the lifestyle and wealth of Mr Duncan Smith and other Cabinet members and most of the electorate.
He called on Mr Duncan Smith "to follow his party's mantra of 'we're all in this together'".
He said: "Look at where he is living, the conditions under which he is living.
"He did a brilliant PR exercise before to depict himself as a compassionate Conservative. He's nothing of the sort, he's viciously attacking the most vulnerable and poorest members of society."
Mr Aversano added that the Work and Pensions Secretary had "put himself in this position". "He made the claim and set himself up for this. It's for him to respond," he said.
But Financial Secretary to the Treasury Greg Clarke defended his Tory colleague. He told Sky News: "All of Iain's reforms and all of the work he does as a constituency MP is to help people, to help people get back on the ladder and to improve their prospects."
According to the petition, reducing Mr Duncan Smith's income to £53 a week would be a 97% drop in his current budget. The Cabinet minister, who lives in a £2m mansion that he inherited from his father-in-law, would need to get by on just £7.57 a day.
Angry comments have been left by some of those who signed the petition. One woman wrote: "Multimillionaires telling the very poor how easy it is to survive on such a limited income need to put their oodles of money where their mouth is."
The Government insists its benefits shake-up, which includes a so called "bedroom tax" on social housing tenants with spare rooms, cuts to council tax benefit funding and a weekly cap on household benefits, is all about "fairness".
It says the current system is "broken", with people who work hard being penalised, and that Britain could no longer afford to reward people who "do the wrong thing".
If Mr Duncan Smith went ahead with the challenge, he would not be the first Conservative MP to attempt to live off benefits.
Former Tory politician turned journalist Matthew Parris took part in a documentary in the 1980s requiring him to survive on social security payments of £26.80 a week. He repeated the experiment 20 years later in a TV programme called For the Benefit of Mr Parris Revisited.
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