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Some major mood-swings in the House of Lords - but as yet no deal to end the confrontation over the . As I write, peers are shuffling back into Westminster, still bleary-eyed after the marathon sitting on Monday-Tuesday. And most seem to expect a repeat performance tonight.

The deep animosity that set in during the interminable committee stage debates earlier in the week seems to have given way to something a bit closer to the Lords' normal collegiality.

The footsloggers clearly hope a solution will be reached, which will mean they all get home at a reasonable hour - but their hopes don't seem to be based on anything very concrete. They pounce on possible compromise-ettes: a loosening of the strict requirement that Commons constituencies can vary from a standard size by no more than 5% either way, an on-line consultative process to consider objections to the boundaries of the new bigger constituencies that will be needed if there are to be fewer MPs.

None of these sound like game-changers to me, but then I've been getting home in time for Hollyoaks this week, rather than snatching a few hours of slumber in the small hours in some makeshift dorm, surrounded by snoring colleagues.

Perhaps there have been some behind the scenes talks - but the murmur is that the Coalition high command wants to see off the challenge from Labour's filibuster, fearing that its whole agenda could be subject to the same tactics, if they succeed on this issue. There's also considerable animosity towards the filibusterers-in-chief, who, I'm regularly reminded, are (sniff) ex-MPs.

All this may look pretty bizarre outside the cool panelled corridors which surround their Lordships' House, but annoying though the government doubtless finds this saga, Oppositions need procedural rights to impede legislation and test the political will of governments. Ministers undoubtedly hate having their policies obstructed by parliamentary gamespersonship, but the alternative is a system where every ministerial whim can be tanked through, and ideas dreamed up by some teenage policy wonk in an attic office in Downing Street can become law without anyone asking hard questions.

There's still talk that the government might try to impose a Commons-style guillotine on the Parliamentary Voting etc Bill, which would completely change the character of the Lords. A less explosive alternative would be for the Leader of the House, Lord Strathclyde, to announce that under the circumstances he felt justified in ignoring the usual convention that the different stages of a bill are taken a fortnight apart... and that the report stage of the bill would follow closely on from the current committee stage.

That would give him considerable room for manoeuvre, and would not even involve having to suspend the standing orders of the House, because the fortnight gap is a convention, not an actual rule. If things got tighter still, he might try suspending the standing order that prevents taking more than one stage of a bill on a given day, so that the report stage and third reading could be taken one after the other.

Labour peers are still insisting they'll keep on going - and they may yet manage to delay the bill to the point where the May referendum on changing the voting system becomes impossible. The stakes remain high and no-one wants to climb down.

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