Everyone knows - or thinks they know - the punchline to the speech Gordon Brown will give on Monday: Britain will not be joining the euro for now.
The interest will be in how he gets there - in what the euro-enthusiasts are calling the road map, and what the Treasury more guardedly describes as the "forward agenda".
The great problem for the government is that we have all been here before.
Way back in October 1997, Mr Brown stood up in the House of Commons and said that although Britain could not join the single currency in the first wave, the government would be taking the steps to make entry possible.
Committees of business grandees were set up to oversee the preparations. Mr Brown promised to increase the flexibility of the economy, press for the completion of the European Union's single market, and make rules on government borrowing consistent with the EU's stability and growth pact.
He even held out the prospect of aligning the Bank of England's inflation target with that of the European Central Bank.
"The time of indecision is over," he said. "The period for practical preparation has begun."
Anyone with a copy of that speech is likely to find much of what Mr Brown says on Monday familiar.
Mr Mark Leonard, director of the Foreign Policy Centre, a think-tank whose patron is Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, says the government "needs to move from the tests having been failed, to having a strategy for joining".
The Treasury's ideas of what that strategy would mean are already clear.
Mr Brown might, for example, propose switching the measure of inflation used by the Bank of England to the international standard Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), and bring the bank's inflation target into line with the European Central Bank's 2 per cent objective - roughly equivalent to the 2.5 per cent target on the current underlying retail prices index measure.
In its inflation report last month, the Bank of England said that in two years' time - the horizon generally used for setting interest rates - the difference caused by the lack of a component for house prices in the HICP would be "negligible".
But the change of target would be little more than a gesture: no one believes that the choice of inflation measure is a barrier to joining.
Other changes flagged up by the Treasury would be more substantive, but take a long time to work. The review of housing finance that could lead to the government supporting a shift to continental-style, long-term fixed-rate mortgages could bring legislation in next year's Budget. But the system is likely to take a few years to become established.
The reviews of regional statistics, to encourage more flexible pay deals, and of housing supply to help labour mobility, are on similar time-scales. But again, both are taking on entrenched practices that will not be easy to change.
Pro-euro economists say these issues are secondary, they do not fundamentally alter the decision.
Mr Martin Weale, director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, suggests their real value would be in helping the public to get used to the idea of joining.
"It is difficult to conclude that we are fundamentally different from the euro zone, but in three years we might not be. But you can think of marriages where people take a long time to decide to do it. That's probably what the three years would be doing."
But none of the things Mr Brown is talking about will, by themselves, do much to win round opinion.
Another reassessment of the tests in, say, 2006, could come up with another delay, which is why europhiles are urging the government to make stronger commitments.
"The big test will be whether the government is seen to be taking a political risk," Mr Leonard says. "If it doesn't do that, then no one will take it seriously."
