Did MEPs lose their nerve yesterday when they failed to sack the Commission? Yes, according to the Murdoch press.
The truth is it's impossibly difficult to tell. To see if they moved in the course of the week you'd have to know where they started. And that's quite a separate issue from whether there were real grounds in the first place to merit the ultimate sanction.
Part of the problem in predicting the way this Parliament will vote lies precisely in the fact that, unlike national assemblies, MEPs do not elect a government. This has profound implications for the chamber's dynamics.
To survive, a government needs disciplined support and hence a whipping system to ensure both the loyalty of its supporters in crucial votes and their attendance. The absence from yesterday's vote of over 10 per cent of MEPs is simply inconceivable in the Dail.
And with parties unable to whip members, voting alliances become shifting sands. In the end a third of the second-largest party, the European People's Party, voted against its leadership, while in the Socialist Group the German contingent, to a man, defied their leader. Indeed the extraordinary unanimity of all the Germans across the political spectrum has created a powerful new oppositionist current in the Parliament that changes its internal dynamics.
Stable government also requires an executive to have a system by which its antennae are sunk into the body politic. Yet Commissioners this week had no more idea than reporters or even group officials how the votes were going to pan out and appeared to have done little to find out.
With big European Parliament debates, the days running up to the vote are less about shifts in position and more about the uncovering of unmoving realities buried under layers of political camouflage.
The uncertainty, verging on panic, inside the Commission led its President, Mr Jacques Santer, into an indiscreet and unnecessary threat to resign and a potentially dangerous solo run with reform proposals that he had never cleared with colleagues. It was not a good week for Mr Santer.
Nor, indeed, for the leader of the Socialist Group, Ms Pauline Green. According to more than one of her troops, she has shortened her term as leader with tactics that turned a political problem into a near-apocalyptic crisis by invoking the so-called "nuclear option" of threatening to sack the whole Commission if even one of them was targeted.
Her position, which also involved putting down a no-confidence motion in order to vote against it, was perhaps theoretically justifiable, but politically naive. In the end it looked as if the Socialists would do anything to protect the Commission. Playing an altogether different game, the Liberal leader, Mr Pat Cox, on the other hand, scooped the pot.
Mr Cox understood that the Commission's bungling of a number of dossiers probably did not warrant sacking but had handed the Parliament an extraordinary opportunity to make once again the case for greater political accountability in the Commission and to seriously extend its oversight role.
By personalising a theoretical issue at the heart of the Parliament's case for more power, specifically the right of MEPs to sanction individual members of the Commission, he brought the issue from a dusty back drawer to the centre of debate. It was tough if Commission heads rolled, but that was politics. Nor did it matter if the motion to target Ms Edith Cresson and Mr Manuel Marin was lost. The political reality was that once the cat was out of the bag it would not go back in.
And indeed the result of yesterday's vote is profound in the long term. What prospective commissioner, let alone prospective president, coming before the Parliament next autumn for its approval, is likely to want to be seen to offend MEPs by opposing their demand for a treaty right to sack individual commissioners?
Nor are national governments likely to oppose a Commission's wish that Parliament should be extended such rights when the next Inter-Governmental Conference is held.
MEPs are learning that their heavily circumscribed rights are potentially powerful levers with which to extract more.