Snail's pace...
No end in sight. Their lordships have debated the through the night and have just rejected a second motion from Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, to take a breather.
Progress continues at snail's pace, despite the taking the highly unusual step, at midnight, of forcing a vote.
As I speak, tempers are visibly fraying, and Labour peers are keeping up a flow of amendments and speeches. And perhaps they believe they're winning. Not winning the votes, but winning the game of spinning out proceedings to the point where the Coalition's objective of holding their referendum on voting reform in May becomes impossible. The unofficial deadline is 16 February, by which time peers must have completed the committee stage debates on the bill, and the report stage and third reading, and settled any differences with the Commons. That cannot be achieved without Labour's co-operation. In the Lords, they don't have guillotine procedures or a Speaker with the power to clamp down on obvious filibustering - and the clock is ticking.
Labour's strategic objective is to break the bill into two - and allow the referendum to go ahead, while requiring the section on cutting the size of the Commons and redrawing the constituency map of Britain to be re-introduced as a second bill. And the funny thing is that defeat may not be a disaster for the Coalition whichever way this titanic procedural battle goes. The plan to cut the number of MPs may turn out to be more trouble than it's worth - as I've blogged before. And not holding a voting reform referendum in May, at a time when some polls suggest it may be close to unwinnable (I know, I know, that's a view plenty of people would dispute) may not be a disaster for the Coalition either.
But the Coalition Agreement, the keystone of the government's legislative programme, is an inflexible beast, and renegotiating key provisions is not a simple exercise.
And meanwhile the sight of the Lords engaged in an extended procedural fandango may embolden the drafters of the forthcoming draft bill on Lords reform.
I'm Mark D'Arcy and I'll be writing about what goes on in the chambers and committee rooms at Westminster.
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