So Britain has got one of the top two EU jobs, and arguably the more important one.

Cathy Ashton is a warm, likeable, natural coalition-builder who appealed to the European left as one of its own - and was acceptable to the right as the EU Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso had learned he could do business with her.

It is an extraordinary rise for someone who has never run for elected office, who spent just a year in the cabinet and a year as an EU commissioner. She has no experience of foreign affairs other than the past year of representing the EU in world trade talks.

Will she become the answer to the Kissinger Question ("who do I call if I want to call Europe?") or, as appears more likely, an envoy or ambassador representing positions on which the EU has an agreed position?

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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".

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"My Lords, and members of the House of Commons. My government's over-riding priority is to win a fourth term in office.
 
"My government shall bring forward legislation to highlight the big choice facing one's subjects.
 
"A Bill shall be introduced to guarantee high-quality state education and to allow my ministers to suggest that anyone who opposes such Bills shall be in favour of the few and not of the many."

It is always amusing to see what language the incumbent party's spin doctors can slip into Her Majesty's speech without the Royal courtiers vetoing it. They are unlikely, however, to succeed in going quite as far as the mythical extract above.

Ministers insist that they are enacting the people's priorities. Their opponents insist, just as vehemently, that those ministers are electioneering. They may, of course, both be right.

Labour believes that the public wants new laws to guarantee better school standards, to give free personal care to those in greatest need still able to live at home and to strengthen banking regulation. They can point out that proceeding with a flood and water management bill is hardly naked politicking.

Their political foes will point out that laws as gestures or aspirations - promising to halve the deficit, to halve child poverty and to give every child a legal right to good schooling - are worth little more than the paper they're written on.

One thing's clear. Soon, you'll have the chance to vote on who's right.

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