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A lot of people are having fun speculating about who'll be elected to Ed Miliband's Shadow Cabinet - the results will be interesting for what they tell us about the new balance of power in the party, and the policy approach of the self-styled new generation of Labour leadership.

But decisions over who gets what when Mr Miliband allocates the portfolios will also set up the key Commons duels for the next couple of years.

The key question is who will shadow the Chancellor. The fate of the Coalition rests on "the economy, stupid" - and Labour needs someone who can not only master the economics, but also campaign on them in the House and in the country, and sing from the same policy hymn sheet as their leader. The pool of candidates with all those attributes is quite limited - but what should be absolutely clear is that a Shadow Chancellor who is simply chewed up and spat out by George Osborne would go some way to conceding the next election.

Look at the long history of Chancellor Gordon Brown and his many Conservative shadows, most of whom were trampled into the dust. This is a post that cries out for a strong, self-confident and effective parliamentarian - and the choice simply can't be dictated by the concerns about Ed Balls's Brownite past. Whoever is chosen will have to hit the ground running - and reply to the great cuts announcement (the Comprehensive Spending Review) on 20 October. This may be the single most important parliamentary moment of the next five years. To coin a phrase, it will be no time for a novice.

Another key appointment will be a shadow home secretary, capable of exploiting the Coalition's apparent softer line on criminal justice issues. New Labour may be dead (Β© Ed Miliband) but a part of the Blair-era formula that party elders like Jack Straw insist was successful was a hard line on crime.

Tony Blair pioneered it as shadow home secretary under John Smith, proclaiming he was "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime" (and incidentally, duffing up the-then Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Secretary Ken Clarke). In government, Jack Straw, David Blunkett and their successors continued the toughness mantra. Now the Coalition is talking about alternatives to prison, cutting back on ASBOs, CCTV and DNA databases and the rest. So some strategists suggest an effective communicator who can empathise with Labour's core vote is needed. The incumbent, Alan Johnson, has been re-applying for his job with a conference speech accusing the Coalition of failing to keep the streets safe. Whether it's him or someone else, expect more of that...

An undertone to this is that some Conservatives believe Theresa May is not the right home secretary. Waiting for my shampoo and set a few weeks back, I was flicking through GQ magazine (not my regular reading) and I happened on an astonishing attack on her by the well-connected Conservative commentator Matthew D'Ancona. A (small L) liberal home secretary could end up watching her backbenchers cheer a rumbustious Labour shadow. Watch out for the device of Tory backbenchers praising the record of Michael ("Prison Works") Howard.

Which brings me to another key post: justice secretary/shadow deputy prime minister. This could be one post, or even two - and at the moment they're combined in the person of Jack Straw, who's standing down from front bench politics.

Leading for the Opposition on Nick Clegg's extensive constitutional agenda could be a full time post in itself, and one that will require a shrewd parliamentary tactician to exploit the Coalition's internal strains over voting reform, constituency re-drawing, Lords reform, party funding reform and all the rest. Harriet Harman showed herself to be effective in targeting Coalition fault-lines during her brief stint as acting leader - and there's a certain logic to having the deputy leader shadowing Nick Clegg. There have been murmurs that she's not a great one for policy detail, but the same critics admit that she has a very sharp eye for the political crux of any issue. At the same time, the justice brief requires someone with legal qualifications - which she has, along with a CV which includes a spell as solicitor general and time on what was then the National Council for Civil Liberties. So this looks like a good fit - and a suitably prominent role for the titular second in command.

And staying with the theme of parliamentary tactics - we now know that the new Opposition chief whip will be Rosie Winterton - Ed Miliband having requested the incumbent, Nick Brown, not to seek re-election. What Labour will need from her, and from whoever shadows Leader of the House Sir George Young are some really clever Commons operators. For most of the last decade, parliamentary manoeuvres have had a pretty minor impact on how the public sees politics. But with the advent of the Coalition, they are now much more important. Labour will need Commons strategists capable of entangling the Lib Dems and Tories in their own divisions. Taken individually, small parliamentary coups may not matter very much, but if the Coalition is plagued constant rebellions, they'll look like a shower - a perception that ate away at John Major's administration and contributed to its ultimate implosion.

Elsewhere, I still expect a lot of new faces in the next shadow Cabinet, simply because the current make-up, appointed in government, doesn't reflect the ideological make-up of the Labour MPs. In opposition, they get to vote on the occupants of their top table, which means that some of the appointed favourites of the Blair/Brown years, who don't command much support from their colleagues, may be heading for the backbenches, or at best, junior posts. Given the scale of the spending cuts about to hit across government, every shadow minister will have plenty to chew on - the test for the Ed Miliband leadership will be to co-ordinate their response, so that collectively they have a coherent strategy.

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This week's rather depressing figures on UK public borrowing (Β£5.3bn in August) underline the importance of the Treasury Select Committee's hearing to confer its approval of Institute for Fiscal Studies supremo Robert Chote, as the new head the new Office for Budget Responsibility.

The OBR - the new quango which is supposed to ensure governments don't run amok with the national credit card - will make independent assessments of the economy and the national finances and conduct its own forecasts; so, for example, a Chancellor can't make his figures add up by assuming some absurdly optimistic rate of economic growth, which magically brings the national accounts back into the black.

In truth, the hearing was a bit of a love-in, with committee members all but tickling Mr Chote's tummy. But this is a serious appointment - even if few people yet appreciate quite how powerful this guy could be in the right circumstances. If Mr Chote and the three person Budget Responsibility Committee he will chair decide, one day, that the Chancellor is not doing enough about cutting public borrowing, or perhaps is doing too much, or is fudging the figures so we can't tell what's really happening, they are supposed to raise a majestic hand and issue a rebuke.

The expectation is that ministers will then have to change tack, or face the wrath of the financial markets - and perhaps a Greek style debt crisis. So we're talking about an organisation and an individual whose key function is to do the right thing in extremis.

So Mr Chote and the OBR will have to be pretty fireproof, personally and procedurally. Ultimately their job is to face down a government which may well be under huge pressure - and providing the necessary protection is where Parliament comes in. At the moment the OBR is operating on a provisional basis.

But in due course there will be legislation to enshrine its independence. And already MPs and peers who're concerned about these matters are preparing to ensure that the legislation contains no hidden get-out clauses or trap-doors through which undue influence can be exerted.

The Chancellor has promised the Treasury Select Committee a "double lock" on the independence of Mr Chote and his successors; they have to approve the appointment and, if it ever comes to that, the sacking of the chair and other key figures in the OBR. So a key aim for Parliamentarians will be to ensure these guarantees are written into the forthcoming Office for Budget Responsibility Bill. It may be a rather tekky concern, but you can bet keen eyes will be fixed on the small print of the bill in the City of London.

* Other forthcoming Bills: Justice Minister Tom McNally - the Lib Dem Leader in the Lords - repeated his promise of a bill to reform the law of libel at the Lib Dem Conference. A draft is expected in the new year.

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I've blogged before about the implications of the Coalition's proposals to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600 - and the considerable redrawing of parliamentary boundaries that would be required.

Now the Electoral Reform Society . They found they couldn't do it within the rules proposed in the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill - at least, not without breaking up local government wards (the normal building blocks for parliamentary seats) which they regard as undesirable. In the end, they made the redistribution work by allowing a 10%, rather than a 5% variation from the electoral quota - the standard size for a Commons constituency, about 76,000 voters.

The result is that in many counties the boundaries don't change and the big cuts fall in urban areas - West Midlands, Greater Manchester and Merseyside down four seats, Strathclyde down three, Outer London down two, Tyne and Wear down two. Wales down 11 - where the crop of new Welsh Conservative MPs could be severely culled.

The ERS's work could intensify the debate over the rules for the redistribution - because they found it impossible to apply the rules the Coalition proposes. So we could find that rather technical issues about permitted variance from the electoral quota suddenly assume considerable importance when a committee of the whole House begins to chew on the bill on 12 October.

Not least because those issues will have a direct bearing on the career prospects of many of those who occupy the green benches of the Commons.

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The interregnum is nearly over. Labour will soon have a new leader - and shortly after the winner is announced, Labour MPs will elect the team of top spokespeople to surround their new boss - their Shadow Cabinet. In Government, cabinet jobs lie in the gift of a Labour Prime Minister; in opposition, Labour MPs elect those who sit at the party's top table, and an incoming Labour Prime Minister has to put the Shadow Cabinet in his first Cabinet - although like Tony Blair, they can dispense with unwelcome squatters pretty rapidly. This time, the result of the election could propel some unfamiliar faces into the top team.

"I've yet to meet any man in the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party) who isn't running," grumbled one woman Labour MP. "There are going to be some very strange results...." Around 50 MPs are vying for places, including some rather surprising names. And the general expectation is that some big changes will result.

The maths backs up that view. Three seats on the Shadow Cabinet are directly elected. The Leader and Deputy Leader by the whole Party via their electoral college mechanism (with Harriet Harman staying in place, there's no vacancy and hence no election under way for the deputy's job) and the Chief Whip - for the first time - is directly elected by MPs, rather than being chosen by the Leader from the ranks of those elected to the Shadow Cabinet - and more of this significant change in a moment.

So that leaves 19 places to be decided in what promises to be an exhaustive AV ballot process.... Including six places reserved for women. And in the 21st century Labour Party, the old practice of different factions endorsing slates of candidates seems pretty much dead. Instead the candidates are relying on old-fashioned methods like canvassing and trying to impress in the Chamber. Campaigning was pretty visible at Business Questions this Thursday, where a number of aspirants put in tub-thumping performances. (Tom Harris, Maria Eagle, Mary Creagh, Caroline Flint, Kevin Brennan, and Chris Leslie all popped up while I was watching, and all were armed with carefully-honed soundbites...)

Many may win elevation, often at the expense of eminent former secretaries of state. Some of the grandees of the New Labour decade are now contemplating an abrupt return to the back-benches. Why? Well it's partly generational. Even with stalwarts like Jack Straw and Alistair Darling standing down, a lot of younger, middle ranking ex-ministers believe their time has come. There's also a strong feeling that the present top table includes too many factional holdovers from the Blair-Brown years - and that they're about to be culled, because their factions won't be able to muster enough votes to keep them all in.

Particularly intriguing will be the vote for Labour Chief Whip. In the past the Leader appointed the Chief from within the Shadow Cabinet. But the Parliamentary Party has now voted for direct elections; the prisoners one Labour MP remarked, will choose their governor. The current Chief Whip, Nick Brown, is running. So is Jim Fitzpatrick... and backbenchers murmur that others like the current Shadow Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth, and even the Shadow Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy might join the race. The thinking behind direct elections is that a Chief Whip has to be able to speak truth to power and dispense unwelcome news about what the troops are prepared to put up with. But Labour MPs with long memories are worried about the idea of the Chief having a separate power base from the Leader. They recall the unhappy experience of Michael Foot, who inherited his Chief Whip, Michael Cocks, from Prime Minister Jim Callaghan. The two did not get on, and their frosty relations helped deepen the factionalism which plagued Labour in that era. "The PLP wouln't wear it, if they were at each other's throats," one Labour MP assured me - but it hasn't always been a check on faction-fighting, even in more recent history.

Incidentally, a glance at Labour's last set of Shadow Cabinet elections, way back in 1996, is interesting from a number of points of view. Few of the Cabinet titans of the subsequent 13 years in power were close to the top of the poll -- Gordon Brown was 14th and Jack Straw 13th and David Blunkett 17th, comfortably outpolled by those outside the new Labour elite such as Michael Meacher, Clare Short and Gavin Strang - with Margaret Beckett topping the poll followed by Ann Taylor . There's a moral in there somewhere.....

UPDATE: The excellent Labour List https://www.labourlist.org/ site give their summary of known candidates so far: Diane Abbott, Douglas Alexander, William Bain, Ed Balls, Hilary Benn, Ben Bradshaw, Andy Burnham, Roberta Blackman-Woods, Liam Byrne, Kevin Brennan, Chris Bryant, Vernon Coaker, Yvette Cooper, Mary Creagh, Wayne David, Geraint Davies, John Denham, Jack Dromey, Angela Eagle, Maria Eagle, Caroline Flint, Barry Gardiner, Paul Goggins, Helen Goodman, Peter Hain, David Hanson, Tom Harris, John Healey, Meg Hillier, Huw Irranca-Davies, Alan Johnson, Kevan Jones, Tessa Jowell, Barbara Keely, David Lammy, Chris Leslie, Ivan Lewis, Ian Lucas, Sadiq Khan, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Jim Murphy, Andy Slaughter, Gerry Sutcliffe, Gareth Thomas, Emily Thornberry, Stephen Timms, Stephen Twigg, Rosie Winterton.

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Two top appointments pending in the quangocracy will give two more Commons select committees the chance to take part in the hip new pastime sweeping the Committee Corridor: confirmation hearings.

Tomorrow, the Treasury Committee interviews Institute for Fiscal Studies boss Robert Chote, armed with the Chancellor's promise that they can veto his appointment as Chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility if they don't like the cut of his jib. As boss of the formidably incisive tax and spending think tank, the IFS, Mr Chote is already a powerful voice on economic policy -- if he is installed at the OBR (and its hard to see why the committee would veto him, but we shall see) he will be asked to validate the Government's approach to the deficit, and all sorts of havoc will follow if he chooses to say it is doing too little cutting, or indeed too much. He'll be a crucial figure, so it is important that the Committee teases out his views on deficit reduction and other key questions, not least so they can be compared with his utterances in the future.

The other key appointment hovering into view is a new chairman of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Trust, Sir Michael Lyons having announced that he won't seek a second term of office, when the current one expires next April. Doubtless the Culture Media and Sport Committee will want a chance to meet his successor, and given the membership of the committee, the candidate can expect a rough ride. And what's the betting the Committee's highly effective Chair, John Whittingdale, is busy drafting a letter to the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt to demand a veto over the appointment?

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A pandora's box has been opened by the announcement that the Government wants the current session of parliament to last until Easter 2012, to facilitate the move to 5-year fixed term parliaments.

Parliamentary sessions matter because they are the window within which bills have to be passed. When a session is cut short, usually because of an election, legislation has to be rushed through or simplified or watered down - often all three. A longer session, on the other hand, means that the deadlines faced by ministers who're trying to get a bill through are less exacting. So the effect of extending the current parliamentary year by a about six months - and it's already longer than usual, because the current session started with the post election State Opening on May 25th and was due to continue till November 2011 - is to give plenty of time for the Coalition to pass lots of big bills.

The idea is that once (if?) Parliament passes the Fixed Terms Bill, committing this Parliament to last for five years, it makes sense to divide a five year parliament into five equal sessions, each running from May - April, with the November ritual of State Opening transferred to May. That way, the Commons wouldn't be wasting time with truncated semi-sessions. There was much angst in the Commons when Sir George's written ministerial statement announcing the plan was published yesterday -- and the Leader was summoned to the Chamber after Mr Speaker accepted an urgent question from Labour's Denis MacShane. Sir George - who has a long standing reputation as "a good House of Commons man," found himself accused of trampling on the rights of MPs. But he pointed out that the change was conditional on the passage of the Fixed Term Parliaments Bill, and so there would be plenty of time to debate it during the processing of that Bill.

So while on one level this looks like the kind of skip that marching bands perform in order to switch from one tempo to another, on another, the six extra legislating months thus granted will have a considerable impact on the passage of legislation and on other aspects of the working of the Commons as well. Already there's pressure to allow more time for backbench MPs to get private members bills through - although when Sir George Young, the Leader of the Commons, looks at some of the bills down for debate, he might wince and look for excuses. And I gather the new Backbench Business Committee is demanding extra days as well, on the argument that if the session is longer, they should be entitled to a pro-rata increase in backbench debating time. But since quite a lot of the legislation promised by the Coalition has yet to see the light of day, and since there are furious opposition demands for more time to consider Nick Clegg's various constitutional reform bills, those extra six months could fill up pretty quickly.

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One of the more entertaining aspects of the post-election frenzy around the Coalition negotiations was the revelation that Labour ministers sought the advice of Lord Owen (the artist formerly known as Dr David Owen) on the possibility of doing a deal with the Liberal Democrats.

Alright, he was one of the leaders of the 1981 SDP breakaway from Labour, and he did spend much of the '80s in electoral pact with the Liberals, before the two parties merged to form the Liberal Democrats. But he didn't join.

Asking David Owen about the Lib Dems is a bit like asking Disraeli about Gladstone (or vice-versa). Perhaps as a consequence of those stories, there has been a spate of references to the good Doctor as a "Lib Dem Grandee," most recently in the Telegraph at the weekend. I'm not quite sure who would be most insulted by the idea - Lord Owen or the Lib Dem peers.

But I checked. I hadn't missed the Earth shuddering on its axis, and Lord Owen has not joined the Liberal Democrats.

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This September fortnight may be a short Commons session but the select committees are cramming in a lot of important action, with interesting witnesses and a whole phalanx of Cabinet ministers strutting their stuff...

But let's start with the Public Bill Committee on the Superannunation Bill - of great interest to civil servants since it will reduce the level of payments made to them for voluntary and compulsory redundancies. The committee will take evidence in two sessions Tuesday morning and Tuesday afternoon and then start to consider the bill line by line on Thursday. This is the provisional programme:

Tuesday: In the morning the committee will hear witnesses from the Cabinet Office and the Hay Group, and then from Keith Bradford (member of the CBI Employment Committee) and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

In the afternoon, it will be the turn of the Council of Civil Service Unions, Prospect and the First Division Association, followed by Fiona Draper, an independent consultant and the Public and Commercial Services Union.

Now to the select committees - and on Monday, the will have the chance to probe the Coalition's "localims" agenda with DCLG Secretary Eric Pickles along with the Housing Minister Grant Shapps and Greg Clark, minister for decentralisation.

On Tuesday, the will hear from the Foreign Secretary William Hague and Sir Peter Ricketts, the National Security Adviser, for their inquiry into Who Does UK Grand Strategy?

The session is likely to examine, among other things, current capacity in Whitehall to undertake high level strategic thinking and the framework which may be necessary to sustain it.

The will hear evidence on the National Audit Office's . The witnesses will be officials from the NHS and the Department of Health in north-west England.

The will be looking at the law on drink and drug-driving - witnesses will include the AA, the Association of British Drivers (ABD), the RAC Foundation, and the Association of Chief Police Officers. But the star may be Sir Peter North, who has proposed cutting the blood alcohol limit to 50mg/100ml and who says the UK needs "a step-by-step assault" on drug-driving.

With continuing rows over the culpability of the banks in the economic crisis, the will kick off its new inquiry into financial regulation with the former City Minister Lord Myners and Professor Charles Goodhart. They're expected to ask about the government's proposals for moving regulation to the Bank of England. Will this centralise too much power in the bank?

They'll also vet Dr Martin Weale, who's been appointed to the Monetary Policy Committee - the people who set the UK's interest rates.

The take more evidence on the government's proposals for immigration caps. Witnesses include the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association, Highly Skilled Migrant Programme Forum and Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of Migrationwatch.

The will take evidence on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport Accounts 2009-10 from Jeremy Hunt the new Secretary of State, and Jonathan Stephens, Permanent Secretary. This will be a catch-all session in which the committee can run the gamut of DCMS issues.

And the continues its scrutiny of the voting reform bill, with evidence from the Electoral Commission, including chair Jenny Watson, on the implications of the government's proposals for the work of the commission.

On Wednesday, a key, but probably very tekky session of the - with the Secretary of State for Iain Duncan Smith. The committee will be keen to ask about the new DWP strategy paper, 21st Century Welfare, which includes proposals to move people off benefits and into work by increasing work incentives, and about the Chancellor George Osborne's announcement that he plans to extract an extra Β£4bnn from the welfare budget. With huge cuts to welfare spending a central part of the Coalition's governing strategy, Mr Duncan Smith may offer the first real glimpse of how he plans to make the savings - or not.

The Public Accounts Committee examines the findings of the recent with Robert Devereux, from the Department for Transport and Bill Emery, chief executive, Office of Rail Regulation.

At the , Energy Secretary Chris Huhne comes in to talk about the impact of spending cuts, the energy costs faced by consumers, climate change, carbon-capture and storage, and deepwater drilling in UK waters - and that last subject is picked up later when the committee hears from the outgoing BP chief executive Tony Hayward and the company's head of safety, Mark Bly (author of the BP report about the disaster published this week), on what went wrong in the Gulf of Mexico and the implications for the Coalition's plans to allow deepwater drilling off the coast of Scotland.

In a similar vein the Education Committee's inquiry into child safeguarding will hear from the former Haringey Council director of children's' services, Sharon Shoesmith, followed by Education Minister Tim Loughton.

Environment Secretary Caroline Spellman will explain the implications of a 25% spending squeeze on nature conservation and environmental protection to the .

On Thursday, Nick Clegg's junior minister Mark Harper gives evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee on the two bills currently working their way through the House, on voting reform and fixed term parliaments.

And the continues its inquiry into strategic thinking in Whitehall with evidence from Sir Robert Fry and other retired Navy and Air Force personnel.

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The Commons have voted to send the allegations of hacking of MPs' voicemail by the News of the World to the for investigation.

The central figure in them is Andy Coulson, formerly News of the World editor, and now David Cameron's media supremo, who resigned when the hacking was revealed and one of his reporters was jailed, but who has always insisted he did not know of their illegal activities.

The debate was pretty impressive, with a succession of MPs who've been turned over by the tabloids - Simon Hughes, Nadine Dorries and others - railing at their tormenters. One of the most interesting facets was the discussion of the earlier investigation of media standards by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee in which former journalist Paul Farrelly lamented the refusal of various key News International figures to give evidence.

There was also some pretty brutal criticism of the Metropolitan Police - Chris Bryant, the Labour MP who opened the debate, complained about the "new theology" he said had been adopted by the Met under which it was for the victim, rather than for the police to provide evidence of a crime....He received some pretty vehement "hear hears" when he sat down after demanding that the Commons should treat the hacking of MPs' phones as a breach of privilege.

John Whittingdale - the chair of the culture committee - reminded MPs of the sheer scale of "blagging" operations undertaken by a private detective on behalf of journalists from several newspapers - thousands of people's personal data was obtained, among them the former Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle. The practice was pretty routine, Mr Whittingdale said - but he added it was mostly stamped out by the . He thought that some of the information that had emerged about phone hacking in recent days seemed to contradict evidence that had been given to his committee, so he welcomed the inquiry, even though he feared it might be mired in party politics.

One of the most powerful speeches came from the Labour MP Tom Watson - who asked an urgent question on the issue on Monday. He talked about the "red-topped assassins" of the media who "sneered at Parliament". All politicians feared them; prime ministers quailed before them, and the innocent were traduced "for money, for spite, for sport".

He said one MP had discovered his phone had been "blagged". Another had had his PDA examined and discovered it had almost certainly been hacked into. Three senior former Labour ministers, he said, had yet to go public with their serious concerns that their phones had been hacked. "Something very dark" lurked in the evidence around the case of private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who was jailed for phone hacking, he said. He recommended that the Standards and Privileges Committee should call in the News of the World and News International staff who had not been willing to speak to the culture committee.

The government and the official opposition both backed the call for an inquiry - and new chairman of S&P, Labour's Kevin Barron, will preside over it. Their sessions are not normally public - and these could be some of the most politically charged in years.

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There's a frisson of excitement this morning over today's - placed on the agenda by the Backbench Business Committee.

The motion is that the House "supports the continued deployment of UK armed forces in Afghanistan", and according to the rumour mill a "senior Conservative" is expected to vote against.

There's also a "troops out" amendment proposed by the Greens' Caroline Lucas, Plaid Cymru's Jonathan Edwards and three Labour left wingers; and the Conservative defence specialist Julian Lewis might attract a fair amount of support for his amendment making the House's support conditional on the adoption of "a more realistic military strategy...designed to fulfil the UK's long-term interests in the region at lesser cost in life, limb and financial resources".

The government whips, it is said, were not at all keen on having this debate, but their pressure was resisted - so the Backbench Business Committee has provided MPs with a valuable opportunity to debate one of the most pressing issues on the national agenda.

There's also a bit of annoyance among some of the more diligent backbenchers about an e-mail circulated by one of the whips, Michael Fabricant, apologising for the regular imposition of a three-line whip for Backbench Business Committee debates, which has meant that MPs have had to make the supreme sacrifice of attending the Commons on Thursday afternoons.

Since the government, he says, often doesn't know the subjects for these debates till quite late on, MPs have to assume they must attend. Greater love hath no man than that...

But the Afghanistan debate, and next week's on the ultra-sensitive subject of the Strategic Defence Review (should the government cancel Trident replacement, scrap aircraft carriers, downsize the Army, or Navy or RAF, or cancel any number of vital weapons programmes, with huge implications for defence industry jobs?) are subjects on which backbenchers are gagging to give their views.

It's refreshing; Parliament is actually debating key issues.

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A certain amount of backbench grumbling in the Tory ranks, as the whips prepare to unveil two new waves of .

PPSs are unpaid ministerial bag-carriers, link-persons between the government and the footsloggers in the parliamentary party. It is the first rung on the government ladder, an apprenticeship to power. Some of the real high flyers in the new intake may expect to skip over it, and straight into office at the first reshuffle, so the names which emerge are more likely to be utility midfielders than star strikers.

Between eight and 10 are expected to be announced soon - and a second wave will be named a little later. But the grumbling relates to the size of the "payroll vote", the MPs who are part of the government and are bound to vote for its every move, or resign.

There was much criticism during the last government that the growing number of official appointees, not just ministers but supernumery unpaid ministers, a growing legion of PPSs, envoys and czars, bound too many Labour parliamentarians to the government line. (This is one of the recurring themes in the excellent second volume of the former Labour MP Chris Mullin's backbench diaries.)

In this parliament there is an extra dimension to the irritation over the payroll vote. A number of backbenchers on all sides think that if the Commons is to be reduced in size by 50 MPs - about 8% - then the number of ministers, PPSs etc should shrink too. If not, the payroll vote will take up a bigger proportion of the House, with unhealthy consequences for parliamentary scrutiny.

Look out for amendments on that issue to the Parliamentary Voting and Constituencies Bill...

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Apologies for the failure to blog before now; I've had a frantic first couple of days back in harness. Yesterday I was in nerd heaven at the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee, as the Clerk of the Commons, Dr Malcolm Jack fired a couple of exocets into the Coalition's plans for fixed term parliaments.

There is some political urgency to the because it would set the Coalition's promise to serve for a full five year term into legislative stone.

Once passed, it would take away the prime minister's traditional right to advise the Queen to dissolve parliament at a moment of his choosing, and so end the option for David Cameron to hold a "cut and run" election, timed to secure a full majority and ditch his Lib Dem partners. But, as ever with constitutional legislation, there are all kinds of ramifications.

The proposal is that there would need to be a vote of two thirds of all MPs to dissolve parliament before the target date of May 2015. The only other way an election could be held is if the government fell on a confidence vote - which would only require a simple majority - and it proved impossible to assemble a new administration within 14 days. Then an election would automatically follow.

The problem, according to Dr Jack, is that once you have legislation specifying the nature of a Commons vote, the vote could be challenged in the courts. Suppose the division bells failed in some remote corner of the parliamentary estate, and some MPs didn't make it into the lobbies. Suppose there is some error in the vote-count. In normal circumstances such matters are handled in-house, by Mr Speaker. But the act of specifying a two-thirds majority in primary legislation, says Dr Jack, lets the courts into the process - even the European ones, which might be less reluctant to trespass on parliamentary issues than the UK courts.

The nightmare scenario could be the cancellation of an election in mid-campaign or, worse still, an on-off election where a lower court cancels it, only to be over-ruled by a higher court. What fun we hacks would have!

Dr Jack's solution is to write as much of possible of the rules on dissolution and no-confidence votes into the Commons Standing Orders, which should at least minimise the possible grounds for legal challenge. He had a great time laying out precedents for voting irregularities - only on Monday there was some confusion around MPs not realising the second reading vote on Nick Clegg's AV Referendum proposals () was under way.

Back in 1974 a key vote on the Labour and Trades Disputes Bill was tied, and then a Labour MP, Harold Lever, complained he was recorded as voting when he had in fact been absent...and so a third reading vote had to be set aside and an important bill had to be called back from the House of Lords. Precedents for the German Constitutional Court having to rule on whether the Bundestag had been properly dissolved were dissected, and the entertaining prospect of constitutional chaos amidst an election was pondered at length.

Of course the government hotly disputes that its bill would indeed have this effect. It insists it is not realistic to expect that the courts would start trespassing on the internal workings of Parliament. Indeed, Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689 provides that "proceedings in Parliament" cannot be "impeached or questioned in any court". The Coalition points out that the bill specifies that the Speaker's certification of when the Commons has passed a motion by two thirds or the no confidence process set out in the bill has been complied with is "conclusive for all purposes", meaning the decision about whether the conditions for an early election are satisfied is for the Speaker, not for the courts or the executive.

Nor are ministers keen on Dr Jack's idea of using standing orders to set out the required two thirds majority because they can be amended, suspended or revoked by a single simple majority vote of the House of Commons - so they could be changed at whim.

They regard it as essential that the two-thirds majority for a dissolution motion is enshrined in legislation, so any change would have to be made by primary legislation, which would mean passing both Houses of Parliament.

The bill will have its second reading next Monday - Nick Clegg, still nursing his contusions from the second reading of the AV bill, may face another rough ride.

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