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Last night on Newsnight I reported on how the government's plans to radically redraw the boundaries of Parliamentary constituencies are meeting opposition in all sorts of places - from Labour Liverpool to the Conservative Isle of Wight.

The government is proposing two big changes in one. First, the number of MPs will be cut from 650 to 600. Second, they plan to make constituency sizes much more equal - with the exception of two small Scottish offshore island seats, all constituencies will have to be no more than five per cent bigger or smaller than the average quota, currently calculated to be around 76,000.

, shows that the net effect in terms of distribution of seats will be a lot less dramatic than many Labour people fear, and many Conservatives no doubt hope. The Tories would lose 13 seats, Labour 25 and the Lib Dems seven.

So the Conservatives would in effect be 12 seats better off in comparison to Labour than they are now. But they would still be seven seats short of an overall majority in the Commons.

Under Stuart Wilks-Heeg's predicted figures the Tories would have four per cent fewer MPs than now, Labour 10 per cent fewer, and the Lib Dems would suffer most - with 12 per cent fewer MPs, even though they are backing the proposals under the Coalition agreement.

One should stress that Stuart Wilks-Heeg's calculations are inevitably very rough. Nobody really knows how the new boundaries will actually be redrawn and so precise predictions are difficult. And his reckoning is on the basis of the current first-past-the-post voting system. If voters approve the new AV system in the referendum scheduled for next May then the Liberal Democrats would be considerably better off.

But these boundary changes may have more far-reaching effects in all sorts of other ways.

First, the new boundaries won't be set in stone until October 2013, so the parties won't really be able to pick any candidates until then. Then will come a mad rush of musical chairs over the following 18 months, as sitting MPs scrabble to grab the smaller number of seats. Lots of MPs will lose out.

It will be interesting to know if the whole process will make MPs more independent-minded, in the hope this will impress local parties in neighbouring areas, or more loyal, in the hope that their parties' high command will somehow rescue them.

My guess is that it will make MPs less beholden to the whips, especially given that in 200 safe seats the government is going to pay for special primary elections of all voters for the sitting parties in those seats, just like the Tories had in several seats in the last Parliament.

Nor can any MP assume he is safe from the boundary redrawing process, apart from those for the two exempt seats, Orkney and Shetland, and the Western Isles. Even if a constituency has the exact number of voters to fulfil the new quota, it doesn't mean it will be left intact by the boundary commissioners.

Many seats of the right size will be affected simply by the knock-on effect of redrawing boundaries elsewhere. And under the process the boundary commissioners will no longer treat county boundaries as sacrosanct.

The other effect of putting off candidate selection for more than three years is that it also puts off that increasingly mentioned question - will the Conservatives and Lib Dems cement their coalition friendship with electoral pacts in certain seats, and agree not to stand candidates against each other?

Constituency politics for all parties is about to enter a period of fascinating turmoil. And don't rule out yet another set of boundary changes in the 2015 Parliament to take account of the 2011 census and the introduction of individual registration of voters.