Britain's European presidency approaches its climax in Cardiff today. But the eyes of an expectant nation (well, of the English anyway) will be on events further afield.
New Labour's media management skills are now the stuff of legend. Mr Alistair Campbell once famously moved to persuade broadcasters that Mr Blair's Labour conference speech should take top billing over the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial. But it will take more than the undoubted talents of the Prime Minister's official spokesman to dictate today's news agenda. The big story of the day will be of triumph or disaster on a football pitch in Marseille.
The Cardiff summit will of course prove a good deal more newsworthy if the promised row with Germany's Chancellor Kohl lives up to its advance billing. Trailing in domestic polls ahead of the September election, the Chancellor is said to have seized Margaret Thatcher's handbag and to be preparing to descend on Cardiff in a fit of Euro-scepticism. Top of his shopping list is the demand for a reduction in Germany's net contribution to the EU budget. But he better be prepared for battle. Put to it, Mr Blair will have to defend his own Thatcherite inheritance - the multi-billion pound rebate she won in 1984.
Indeed Britain's Euro-sceptic press is already relishing a welcome return to the bad old ways. "Blair to EU: hands off our money", one headline screamed yesterday above a report that Mr Blair is preparing for a much narrower pursuit of the British interest once freed of the obligations of the presidency.
But whatever battles lie ahead, that is hardly the story Mr Blair wants to emerge from these two days in Cardiff. The British presidency has been, to say the least, a distinctly underwhelming affair. It began last December at Waterloo station with a great fanfare - Mr Blair trumpeting New Britain's new beginning with its European partners. "A test for Britain and Europe", the prime minister declared, promising the "strong leadership in Europe" his Tory predecessor had so lamentably failed to provide.
His minister-without-portfolio, Mr Peter Mandelson, went further. Britain, he said, would "lend our ingenuity, our ideas, our passion to recreating a sense of ownership by the people of the European Union".
It sounded like overblown tosh at the time. And so it has proved to be. Britain's presidency has been more-or-less technically competent, and far from the "complete disaster" described by some Brussels sources. It draws to a close, moreover, with the welcome news of an end in sight to the worldwide ban on British beef. But the main events of the past six months have only served to underline Britain's unresolved attitude to the grand European project. Mr Blair has acknowledged that the Brussels summit, to launch the euro and appoint the President of the European Central Bank, was a mess. And the exclusion of the Chancellor, Mr Gordon Brown, from the first meeting of the Euro-X committee of finance ministers monitoring and co-ordinating policy among single currency participants was a harsh reminder of the difference between the rhetoric and the reality of positive Europeanism.
Mr Blair and Mr Brown won the benefit of a considerable doubt last October when they signalled their support in principle for membership of the single currency, and promised a steady build-up of preparations in anticipation of British membership some time after the next election. But many of the Prime Minister's pro-European friends now despair of him ever inviting the displeasure of Mr Rupert Murdoch or the tabloid press, or of following through on his commitment if it threatens the break-up of the coalition which won him the last election.
That coalition is generally content that Britain's presidency has been, if not exactly undistinguished, then certainly uneventful. It cheers Mr Blair on when he talks about flexibility in the labour market, and about enlargement - not least because it believes enlargement the instrument to check the federalist design. It frets that Mr Brown is a genuine Europhile. But it can live comfortably with warnings from the Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, repeated yesterday, that there is a limit to how long Britain can "sit on the fence" on the question of the euro. Mr Blair looks comfortably set to remain there for a considerable time to come.