The press room was packed for Jacques Santer's farewell on Wednesday. It has not always been so.
Sometimes, in the last couple of years, the pressing demands of "important" Brussels lunches have depleted the attendance at the Commission President's occasional forays to the press room. Questioning too, from the few of us who showed up, has been as lacklustre as the President appeared to us.
The message was almost always the same: "Do less, but better". Hardly a rallying call to die for, let alone a story that could be sold to news desks, but, lest we forget, precisely the purpose for which he was appointed.
A compromise candidate who stepped forward at the last moment in July, 1994, when the British Prime Minister, Mr John Major, vetoed the appointment of Belgium's Jean-Luc Dehaene, Mr Santer was the ideal candidate for Europe's leaders at the time precisely because he was not a Jacques Delors.
A steady hand on the tiller was what was needed to steer the great ship of the EU on a predetermined course. A radical visionary like Mr Delors would have rocked the boat or set it off on new adventures and would have fought with all and sundry. Consolidation was the message, and who better than the affable prime minister of consensual Luxembourg where the premium is on continuity and compromise and the biggest of political waves would scarcely knock a toddler off his feet.
It's not surprising then that Mr Santer can express disappointment at the way events have treated him. "I'd be a hypocrite if I did not admit that I do feel a certain bitterness, tinged with a certain sense of injustice as I leave my duties," Mr Santer told us on Wednesday. The truth is we got what we paid for.
Mr Santer is right to say that in the longer perspective of history this Commission will be remembered for what it did, as well as for what it did not do. The steady hand on the tiller brought us the launch of the euro, agreement on Agenda 2000, the enactment of the Treaty of Amsterdam, a new employment strategy, a new enlargement strategy and process, and the outline of a framework for peace and reconstruction in the Balkans.
Emerging, as by osmosis, from the euro process is also a new form of collective economic governance by peer review whose significance is yet to be fully appreciated. Not to mention the steady day-to-day work of directorates such as Agriculture, Environment, Social Affairs, and Competition, virtually untouched by scandal.
But management by consensus is not appropriate when the ship is about to hit the rocks. Left to their own devices, as the gathering storms broke, commissioners used the individual freedom that they had enjoyed in the early Santer years to distance themselves from colleagues rather than getting to grips with the problems of internal reform that had been left aside too long.
Divisions spelled weakness and the MEPs went for the jugular. Mr Santer was sunk not so much by the corruption and incompetence of the Commission, in my view much exaggerated, but by his political inability to micromanage a crisis for which he was poorly equipped. There was no vision, no strategy, only incremental crisis management that looked more and more desperate by the day.
Inevitably perhaps, reporting of Mr Santer's departure has been dominated by his acknowledgment of his underestimation of the depth of the crisis and strategic errors. But his warning, particularly pertinent to small states, of the dangers of a drift away from finding community solutions to problems, back to inter-governmentalism, is also worth noting.
That was a particular danger, he argued, in the context of EU enlargement, significantly reflecting similar preoccupations to those of the Finnish Prime Minister, Mr Paavo Lipponen, when he warned at the launch of their presidency of the need to oppose the emergence of a directoire or caucus of the dominant large states running the EU's business.
The carving up between the large states of the allocation of a series of top jobs in the EU and European institutions has been causing some concern in the smaller capitals.
And that process did not halt with the allocation of portfolios by the incoming President of the Commission, Mr Romano Prodi. The two vice-presidencies and arguably the key commissionerships of Competition, Enlargement, External Relations and Monetary Affairs all went to the big five.
Maybe, in the longer term, there will also be other reasons to look back with a gentler perspective on the term of a friendly consensus builder with few delusions of grandeur. In fact, I look forward to buying him a pint when we next meet in the Parliament.
