For Douglas Alexander, it was his hottest Commons grilling, though he wasn't even there. The International Development Secretary was returning from a World Bank meeting in the US, so he was represented by Des Browne, grimly deploying his professional skills as a criminal defence advocate.

Convention dictates Mr Alexander is free from the fallout over the Scottish elections fiasco last May, having been succeeded as Scotland Secretary by Mr Browne. But the controversy has stuck to him, with opposition MPs targeting his absent head as the one on the block.

They were helped by pithy quotes from the report by Ron Gould, the Canadian elections expert who spent five months investigating what went wrong last spring - 146,000 spoiled ballots on the Holyrood vote, widespread voter confusion, 10,600 postal votes that didn't arrive on time, long delays in electronically-counted results, doubts about voting secrecy and ballot box security.

It found new evidence that the spoiled votes problem was not as first appeared. Of the 4% of ballots spoiled, three-quarters were counted on one side of the two-column form, with the other left blank. Some might have intended it that way. Of those counted as spoiled, only 17% - or 0.6% of the electorate - had wrongly put two crosses in one column.

It found the Scotland Office, when Mr Alexander was in charge, guilty of delaying decisions and then making them for partisan advantage - not helpful when, as a Tory MP pointed out yesterday, his new job involves telling developing nations they should have fair elections. It must be all the more galling to be accused of trying to fix elections when the SNP's success is evidence of failing to do so.

The blame also spread elsewhere. Former Scottish Executive ministers were responsible for council ballots, insisting they should take place on the same day as the Holyrood vote, and wrangling publicly and along party lines over the design of that ballot form. They were part of the political class that was treating voters as "an afterthought". There were sharp words too for the Electoral Commission for failing to see the warning signs in a 4% rejection rates of the trialled voting form.

Returning officers took some flak for inconsistencies. But the report by Mr Gould, himself an election administrator, showed his sympathies for the challenges faced by officialdom, and kept returning his verdict to the problems they faced from delayed decisions at politician level.

Whitehall sources responded that the conclusion did not follow from evidence. They point out there can be no partisan interest, as the report alleges, in retaining the overnight election count. And there is the defence that making decisions for party political reasons does not seem compatible with taking too long consulting with other parties.

Labour ministers were helped by Ron Gould's press conference yesterday, at which he declined to follow through on his written comments, saying instead that all party politicians behave in a self-interested way.

Des Browne's defence was to offer a heavily qualified apology for what went wrong and to counter-attack with Gould's plague on all political houses. Greens chipped in last night to say that it should be larger parties blamed, as the most partisan intention and effect of the ballot re-design was to squeeze out smaller fry.

Mr Browne's strategy is to ensure that by agreeing to three elements in the report - de-coupling the election days for council and Holyrood votes, separating the regional and constituency voting form, and ending the use of electronic counting for Holyrood elections - the public demand for reassurance will be met.

He was resistant to other suggestions - creating a powerful chief returning officer, ending overnight counts and, above all, devolving Holyrood elections to Holyrood. It is there that Alex Salmond has chosen to confront the Prime Minister, sending him a letter last night proposing discussions on such a devolution of powers.

It would be hard for Downing Street to argue that MSPs could run things any worse.