Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

The peace which broke out in the House of Lords on Monday is beginning to look more like a temporary armistice.

To be sure, the committee stage of the is over, after 17 long days, and exhausted peers are doubtless thankful for that. But they shouldn't pack away their camp beds and spare toothbrushes quite yet. There's still no agreement on timetabling the next part of the bill's parliamentary journey, the report stage, so as to guarantee it clears the Lords next week.

That would allow MPs to process the amendments their lordships have made and send the bill off for the Royal Assent by 16 February. That is the deadline by which the bill must become law if the referendum on changing the voting system, a key part of the Coalition Agreement, is to be held in May.

And that deadline is what makes the Coalition vulnerable.

Labour's price for agreeing a timetable could well be further concessions. Perhaps on reviewing the number of MPs in the Commons, perhaps on the permissible variation in the size of constituencies - or perhaps on other matters, like cutting the number of ministers in proportion to the cut in the size of the Commons.

Lord Strathclyde, the leader of the Lords, feels the government has already made enough concessions - the details are to be published over the weekend - and he is loath to offer any more. Not least because he is worried about encouraging similar "bad behaviour" on future bills. He says the Upper House now stands on a precipice - and if it jumps, by wrecking the government's plans, the result would be a clash with the Commons and ultimately fundamental and far-reaching Lords reform of a kind most peers would hate.

If the government thinks that wrecking tactics are going to be applied to more of its bills, it would have a pretext for such changes. The is coming down the track - and Labour peers look certain to try to change it in a number of ways, notably reducing the lifetime of a parliament from the five years approved in the Commons to four years. Again, they would be striking at a keystone of the Coalition's founding deal.

And then there will be Lords reform and a further bill covering such matters as recall of MPs, more bills that could face serious amendment. This fight is now about much more than this bill. It may be very low key, and decorously polite, but a very serious constitutional clash is under way in that gilded chamber.

* A couple of commentators below disagree with my suggestion that allowing public inquiries (or some form of public hearing) into the boundary changes needed to reduce the number of Commons constituencies could allow a determined Opposition to prevent them taking effect before the 2015 election - if they work hard at gumming up the works. Some Coalition peers are worried that they have opened up a Pandora's box...and a Trojan horse has leapt out. Others, in fairness, are not. I find it hard to believe that the peers who kept talking for so many hours were doing so to secure a modest procedural improvement....and some have said as much over a sherry in the Bishops' Bar. But there was a lot of legal work done last weekend to inject suitable safeguards into the amendment, to prevent such shenanigans, so we shall have to wait and see.

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