The Irish commissioner, Mr Padraig Flynn, is not by temperament a resigner. Early yesterday he was making no bones about having to go as an act of collective solidarity, but one got a sense that this was not the Fianna Fail way. A fight would have been much better.
The Jacques Santer way has seen the Commission engage in scrambled, unplanned and often undignified retreat after retreat in the face of an irate parliament. It has been as if the president's entourage has been constantly surprised by the persistence of MEPs and an increasingly questioning press.
Mr Flynn's impatience with the presidential strategy is understood to have boiled over during the marathon debates in the parliament when all the talk was of mass resignations.
The Finnish commissioner, Mr Erkii Liikanen, tells the story of Mr Flynn, frustrated by the despair and apparent lack of an organised fight-back, rounding on his colleagues with the words: "Ye have all got a death wish."
A far cry, one suspects, from the polite consensual world of Luxembourg politics.
In part it's a matter of the temperament of Mr Santer (61), an affable former Luxembourg prime minister who took office promising that under his direction Brussels, would "do less, but better".
"Mine will be a political commission. People will no longer be able to speak of technocrats," he said.
Unlike the visionary Jacques Delors, Mr Santer produced no new initiatives to push forward the process of European integration. Indeed, some say, that was why he was chosen by EU leaders.
His detractors will argue, however, that he failed to impose his authority, allowing reports of mismanagement, cronyism and misuse of funds to build up in the media and the European Parliament until the issue became impossible to defuse.
At that point he continued offering hostages to fortune, hinting that he would resign if MEPs blocked the discharge of accounts, only whetting their appetites and later promising that he would abide by the findings of the committee of wise men, come what may. Sometimes the pledges were made without even consulting his colleagues in the Commission.
Within the Commission there has been a growing disenchantment with what was seen as a policy of benign neglect and drift and yesterday, sources close to several commissioners were making plain their dismay at the turn of events.
The position was most galling for those whose names had not been tarnished at all by the report and who hoped to be re-appointed, but by the early hours of yesterday morning mass resignation was the only course open.