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Lots of alarums and excursions yesterday afternoon as rumours swept Westminster that the government was about to back off from the surprisingly strong support Gordon Brown expressed for Commons reform last week, as its internal battles over the issue play out.

reported this morning that a cunning procedural device will be used to kick the proposals from Tony Wright's special into touch.

The proposals will be put to the Commons on 23 February as "unamendable orders". That means that if any single MP objects - and there are enough opponents that one, somewhere, is bound to put their head over the parapet - the orders cannot be introduced.

Instead, sometime later, the government has to find an hour and a half of Commons time to debate each order. And with debating time at a premium that would be no easy feat, if, say, 10 orders were laid before the House.

The argument seems to be that such changes are so profound that they can only be introduced on the basis of unanimity - a truly bizarre idea. No Parliamentary reform in the last 500 years could have been enacted on that basis. I sometimes doubt if there is anything at all on which the House of Commons has a unanimous view.

The reform camp is currently keeping its power dry. I understand Michael Meacher, a key figure in the Parliament First pressure group, went to see the Leader of the House, Harriet Harman, yesterday, and is now consulting with colleagues.

But, sotto voce, its members make the point that it is completely within the government's gift to either approach this in a different way - use a different procedure, or make debating time available, and even to group the orders so that they do not need to be debated individually. Last week reformers were surprised at how warm the prime minister was about the Wright recommendations. This week normal cynicism has resumed.

They see a brief window of opportunity before the next election, on the argument that an incoming government will have far too much to do, to fiddle around with the workings of Parliament. But they will be watching what the Conservative shadow leader of the House, Sir George Young, has to say.

After all, it's not so long since he was sitting on David Cameron's Democracy Taskforce, which came up with recommendations strikingly similar to Wright's. Will he assent to what the government now seems to be doing? Or will he promise reform, if he gets to take over Harriet Harman's job, after the next election?

UPDATE: Harriet Harman has just been explaining what is intended at Commons Business Questions.

The idea is that 21 orders (a new nugget of information there) to put Wright recommendations into effect would be laid on 23 February, the day the report is due to be debated. Those on which everyone agreed would go through automatically. Those on which there was disagreement would - as I outlined above - be debated later.

Sir George Young was rapidly on the case at Commons Business Questions, and David Heath, the Lib Dem shadow leader, challenged the Leader to promise that the ensuing debate on the opposed parts of the package should be brought back to the Commons within a week...

Harriet Harman declined to do so. "I can't actually give an undertaking for the following week, but obviously we'll want to do so as soon as possible. For this reason is that we will take the view and advance to the House the view that having had a full debate on all the questions in the Wright report, if any of the motions are objected to and we have to bring them back we shouldn't have to have that debate all over again.

"That argument is undermined if we have too big a passage of time and therefore I hope that when colleagues are debating before we get to the orders of the day motions that they'll recognise that that is the chance to have the substantive debate about the issues that will then fall to be amended if that's how the House wants it to be when we come back for those motions that have not been agreed.

"I'm sorry that has not been terribly clear but please don't be suspicious. It's just quite, quite complicated and actually I think that we should recognise that there are disagreements on this. Certainly we take the view that we want to make as much progress as possible for reform."

From the couple of people I've spoken to since that exchange, it's clear that suspicions have not been laid to rest. The key factor in almost all parliamentary issues now is time.

With the general election looming, most MPs expect Parliament to be dissolved no later than 29 March (assuming, as most do, a May election). So there are not many debating days left - and fitting in lots of debates on objected-to orders to reform the House will not be easy.

But the government could do it if it wanted. Sir George Young renewed his suggestion that MPs should stay for an extra day before starting their half term break, in order to debate Wright. But I bet they won't.

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