Unfixed term

A small bet: if there's a majority government after the next election, be it Labour or Conservative, the ensuing Queen's Speech will include the Fixed Term Parliaments (Repeal) Bill.

The current guarantee of a five year parliament was a key part of the Con-Lib Dem Coalition deal, ensuring David Cameron couldn't throw over Nick Clegg the minute he saw a polling advantage, but both big parties dislike a measure which could prove highly inconvenient to them.

With governments unable to call an election at whim, the break-up of a coalition would mean not an election, but a negotiation, and possibly the emergence of a new government.. so the Fixed Term Parliaments Act strengthens the position of smaller parties.

And getting rid of it could be the first step in an "Empire Strikes Back" agenda, aimed at scrapping some of the political changes which came into force in the 2010 Parliament.

Two other targets could be in the way.

Chairs of select committees are elected - Conservative party managers were irked at the way the recent all-MP elections for chairs of the Health and Foreign Affairs Committees installed mavericks Sarah Wollaston and Rory Stewart.

Those committee chairs are reserved for Conservatives under a share-out agreed at the start of the Parliament and the complaint was that Labour MPs consciously opted for the candidates who would make life most difficult for the government.

The alternative would be to restrict the electorate to the party to which the committee chair was allocated - which would make the elections a very different game, and probably give the party leaderships much more control.

Next on the hit-list is the Backbench Business Committee. The new system under which a block of Commons time is controlled by backbench MPs rather than party managers has been a huge factor in this Parliament - it has allowed Tory backbenchers to push for an EU referendum, and anti-war MPs to demand a Commons vote before military intervention in Syria, as well as allowing MPs from all sides to raise a whole series of issues outside mainstream political debate, everything from cycling to circus animals.

Here, the preferred solution is to remove the BBBcom's ability to put vote-able motions to the House - which would effectively turn it into a clearing house for slightly steroidal adjournment debates.

Of course, different MPs will have different views on each of these - it's entirely possible to be an ardent supporter of the BBBcom, while thinking fixed term parliaments are a bad idea, for example.

But taken together, these seemingly technical changes would make the 2015 Parliament a very different place - with rather less room for awkward squad backbenchers to make merry.