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Not long now - MPs are bracing themselves for the final act of the tonight.

Scene One: timetabled to last for four hours, will consist of Commons consideration of Lords amendments, in which MPs decide whether to accept or reject the changes made to the bill during its marathon passage of the Lords, which ended last night when the bill at last secured its third reading after five amendments were discussed in a mere hour's debate.

Already there's been an important concession: the long-standing problem of the Isle of Wight is to be resolved by creating two parliamentary seats there - rather than by attaching a chunk of the isle to a mainland constituency. At the moment it is the biggest parliamentary seat with 110,000 voters - but there is strong local resistance to diluting its identity by sharing some voters with some seat across the Solent.

This has a knock on effect, taking Wight out of the overall calculation on which the standard size of a parliamentary constituency is based, so every other seat (apart from the similarly exempted Western Isles and Orkney and Shetland) will now be a little bit bigger. And the two Wight seats will each still be bigger than Orkney and Shetland with 32,000 voters and Western Isles with 22,000.

Then there are some amendments around the referendum on changing the voting system. Labour wants to keep the amendment won in the Lords, that the referendum would be non-binding if the electorate vote for a change, but the turnout is less than 40%; in those circumstances the issue would be thrown back to Parliament, where MPs and peers would take the result under advisement. This is completely unacceptable to the Coalition. Even more so is the proposal from the veteran Eurosceptic, Bill Cash, who has an amendment down which would mean that the voting system could not be changed unless the 40% threshold was passed.

Interestingly, some of his normal ideological allies dislike that idea, because they believe we are heading for a politics in which referendums happen more often, and they don't want to fetter the public will. They would hate to see a referendum on Britain leaving the EU fail to deliver withdrawal because of a similar threshold clause. And I doubt Labour would swallow the change either.

Labour will doubtless also seek to keep the other key change made in the Lords - the greater leeway on the size of Commons constituencies, introduced by the crossbench peer, Lord Pannick. And here we may see the biggest clash in the ping-pong between the two Houses (see below for an explanation of this arcane process). Their lordships can vote to insist on their amendments and bounce them back to the Commons, to see if MPs will keep seeking to reverse them; but only if the supporters of those amendments can maintain their majority. And it may be that some crossbench peers, who were crucial in passing the amendments in the first place, either don't turn up, or decide not to keep defying the will of the elected house.

And if things get tight, and the Wednesday deadline for passing the bill looms, the government does have the option of keeping the Lords sitting on Thursday, when they're supposed to have disappeared for the half-term. Remember, Wednesday is only the last possible day on which the bill could be passed, because the Lords depart on Thursday: keep them sitting - and cancel part of their break - and the bill can be passed a bit later, without losing the referendum on the voting system in May.

One other thought - the interest in the referendum is rising at the moment because the polling numbers from suggest that the voters might just decided to favour a changing in the electoral system. The latest poll suggests the "yes" vote running 10% ahead of the "no" vote - 40% to 30%. Although with 30% of the country in the "don't know" camp, anything could happen.

Which raises an interesting question - what would be more destabilising for the Coalition, a "yes" to AV, or a "no"?

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