Tomorrow the President of the European Commission, Mr Romano Prodi, will yet again raise the ante in his campaign for treaty reform by winning approval in the Commission for specific, ambitious treaty text changes. Undaunted by initial coolness and rebuffs from EU capitals, Mr Prodi is sticking to his guns.
Sources close to him are still convinced he will prevail in opening up a debate over, and even in getting changed, the cumbersome triggering mechanisms of the treaty's flexibility provisions.
Last week his vice-president, Mr Neil Kinnock, unveiled a radical package of administrative reform of the Commission that should transform individual accountability and enhance efficiency.
The week before, Mr David Byrne produced the extensive promised flagship programme of the Commission, its White Paper on food.
Yet strangely, despite the evidence of energy and activism, Mr Prodi's honeymoon with the Brussels press corps is definitely over, if there ever indeed was such a honeymoon.
For reasons that are both largely unclear and unjust, his reputation has slumped to an extent that is quite surprising.
The reforming zeal that brought early good will appears still to be there.
And, apart from the recent major initiatives, the President has shown himself forthright on a wide range of issues both internationally and in terms of key issues such as enlargement and EU treaty reform.
He successfully took on member-states in ending the national flagging and quotas for senior jobs in the Commission, a source of some resentment in capitals but, to most, a good thing.
And he took on MEPs early to set his own clear limits to their encroachment on Commission competences.
That MEPs should grumble or, as they did last week, demonstrate their petulance by postponing a major speech should reflect well on Mr Prodi among those concerned for the institutional balance of the EU.
But such confrontations, and a number of alleged gaffes, have served only to create a malaise in the press corps that the remodelled Spokesman Service, brought firmly under Mr Prodi's control, has found difficult to shake.
Ironically, his very first act, to announce the reshaping of the Commission's communication strategy, has been his least convincing.
Journalists are uncomfortable with the blurring of the line between disseminating information and being sold a product.
And Mr Prodi's friend and personal spokesman, the congenial Mr Riccardo Levi, is a former newspaper editor who served him in the same role in government in Rome and knows his boss well.
But he has failed to convince the press corps there is serious strategic or nuanced thinking going on. The impression rather is of a well-meaning idealist, stumbling from issue to issue.
On the part of the British press there is perhaps a subconscious transference of their deep-seated Euroscepticism into the persona of the President.
Yet Mr Prodi, a passionate Europhile, was never going to transform the Commission into a body acceptable to the Tories.
And the problem is much wider.
There is also a remarkable short-termism in much of the analysis, not only from Britain, which sees only the instant gratification of political initiatives as success. All the rest is failure.
The idea that leadership may be more about setting long-term agendas is regarded as somewhat eccentric.
And that it may be precisely about setting objectives that are just beyond our reach, forcing us to stretch out, to strive, perhaps unsuccessfully, is seen as farfetched.
Strange that after all those years when we bemoaned the lack of initiative and drive by the affable but uninspiring Mr Jacques Santer, we should now criticise Mr Prodi for precisely those failings.
Or that we should regard his collegiality and willingness to let his individual commissioners take their share of the limelight as a sign of weakness. He recently, for example, rejected urgings from the Spokesman Service that he should personally introduce Mr Byrne's White Paper on food.
Strange, too, that we should see as weakness his unwillingness to return to the days of Mr Delors's manipulative networking that meant the President's spies were everywhere.
Yet the real test is a simple question: has Mr Prodi demonstrated poor political judgment and set himself adrift from the member-states? Ahead, yes, but by no means adrift.
Take his radical approach to the Inter-Governmental Conference, his critics argue. Indeed. Mr Prodi's ideas have dominated the debate on how far the current IGC should go, and the game is far from over.
Or, on enlargement, they say, his ill-judged call, subsequently withdrawn, for accession states to be given a clear date for the first enlargement. Premature, maybe. But Mr Prodi has silenced those in Brussels who believed that the evil day could be put off to 2006 or 2007.
In truth, the Commission is working hard and fast to reform itself with a degree of cohesion and commitment that was never there under Mr Santer. The team picked by Mr Prodi has few, if any, passengers. Yet the message is not getting out.
Perhaps the time has come to seriously consider shooting the messenger.
The EU agreed yesterday to keep up sanctions against Yugoslavia, despite appeals from Serbian opposition parties for a partial lifting on humanitarian grounds.
