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Tory leader David Cameron has claimed the Government's legislative programme is "unravelling" after ministers were forced to concede they could introduce laws to complete the clean-up of MPs' expenses.
The apparent concession came after the architect of the reform plan, Sir Christopher Kelly, said he was "disappointed" that there was no mention of it in Wednesday's Queen's Speech.
His comments appeared to catch the Government by surprise, and No 10 rushed out a statement insisting that it would bring forward additional legislation if necessary.
Mr Cameron, who challenged Gordon Brown in the Commons over the omission from the Queen's Speech, said that it was a victory for opposition pressure.
He said on Thursday: "I think that the Queen's Speech is today unravelling because the Government is now saying, apparently, that they will now bring forward these laws.
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"If that happens that will be a major victory for common-sense, for the Conservative party, and for the British public who want to see this sorted out. Either the Government is incompetent and hadn't realised that Kelly's report requires these laws to be passed or they are frightened of their own backbenchers, or perhaps they don't think that cleaning up the House of Commons is as important as they said it was."
However, the Leader of the Commons, Harriet Harman, insisted that ministers still believed that Sir Christopher's remaining recommendations could be implemented by the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa).
"There is no question of us regarding this as just something that can be swept back under the carpet. I think that nobody is in any doubt of the anger and concern there has been and remains amongst members of the public," she said.
"They want it to be sorted out, we have set in process all the actions that need to be taken to sort it out so that we don't set our own allowance system, we don't administer it and if there have been any overpayments they are all paid back. That can all be done before the general election."
She said plans in the legislation to hand over responsibility for the MPs' Code of Conduct and the Register of Members' Interests to Ipsa - which Sir Christopher opposed - would not now be implemented.
