No-one is ready to pronounce Tony Blair's presidential hopes dead but they are certainly reading the last rites for them.
So, Britain looks set to get neither of the top two EU jobs created by the Lisbon Treaty. Gordon Brown's energies are now, some claim, focused on securing an important economic portfolio in the commission for a Brit instead.
It was not, I'm told, Iraq wot lost it for TB. It was first and foremost that he made many European leaders realise what they had potentially created and what they really didn't want - a European figurehead better known, better connected and more charismatic than they were.
So, tonight in Brussels they will haggle instead over which relatively anonymous figure - the Belgian or the Dutch prime minister or the former president of Latvia - should chair their summits four times a year.
Even less clear is who will get the foreign minister or, to be precise, the high representative's job now that David Miliband's turned it down.
Henry Kissinger once famously said he didn't know who to phone if he wanted to call Europe. By the end of this evening I'm not sure he - or his successor - will be any clearer.
PS. Diplomats say anything could happen tonight so complex are the competing interests that have to be reconciled. Perhaps Gordon Brown could even reconsider his rejection of the Spanish government's idea that he should be president. Then David Miliband - who Hillary Clinton described this week as "vibrant, vital, attractive, smart... really a good guy" - could take over as prime minister. Then...I should stop there. Brussels in my experience never produces anything quite that interesting.
Update 12:35: Blair's biographer, Anthony Seldon, argues in this month's Prospect magazine [full article is subscription only] that the former prime minister's rejection might rebound to his successor's benefit.
Seldon claims that Blair now has "an especially jaundiced view of the Conservatives' tribalism in not backing him" and says that the man the Tories have always feared is ready to help Labour campaign but "only if Brown asks him".