Would the last commissioner to leave please turn out the lights? That’s a gross exaggeration of course, but nevertheless, news of two commissioners’ getting more involved in “the countries they know best”, as the euro-euphemism goes, gave a certain fin de regime feel on Monday halfway through the Commission’s five-year term.

Louis Michel, the development commissioner, is taking a month’s unpaid leave in May and June to stand for election in Belgium. Well, not quite: he is campaigning, running last on the list of his French-speaking Liberal party for the Senate, doubtless requiring a 50 per cent swing or something to be elected.

Margot Wallstrom, the communications commissioner, has agreed to run a strategy group for Sweden’s opposition party on Europe. It emerged yesterday that she had forgotten to tell her boss, Jose Manuel Barroso.

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Brussels has once again been wrongfooted by allegations of a conflict of interest. As we reported on Monday, an industry lobbyist who advises Andris Piebalgs, the energy commissioner, has had his contract terminated.

Rolf Linkohr, a former MEP, had already been working for two years before Siim Kallas, Brussels’ Mr Clean-up, sent him a letter asking to clarify whether he had a conflict of interest to declare.  Mr Linkohr says he was dismissed before the letter was sent.

Whatever the case, it certainly appears to have been a case of making policy on the hoof.

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You might not have noticed, but 2007 is the European Year of Equal Opportunities for All. For the launch, there was a big equality bash in Berlin on Tuesday and Wednesday that brought together an exciting line-up of EU ministers, equality bodies, trade unions, employers and non-governmental organisations. "Participation," the Commission revealed snootily on its website, "is by invitation only."

Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of equal opportunities myself, especially when they are intended to apply "for all". But as I scrolled through the Commission’s fantastically elaborate website, I must confess that my heart sank. What, I wondered, was the point?

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European Commission officials essentially fall into one of two categories. On the one side there are the ordinary functionaries who spend years drawing up legislative proposals, writing up impact assessments or monitoring developments in the Italian olive oil market. Perfectly important business, mind you, but in the main their jobs rarely send the pulse racing.

The second (and far more dashing) type of official is the one you find at the directorate general for competition, or DG Comp in short. As Europe’s top competition enforcement officials, they do all kinds of exciting stuff. They get to raid the headquarters of big companies, impose huge fines on businesses that break the rules, and every so often they can tell Microsoft how to run its business.

But over the past year or so, I have detected a subtle change inside DG Comp. It seems that the hard-bitten trust-busters have gone, well, a little academic.

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Blogs are supposed to be engaging, whimsical, opinionated and should at least try to provide an entertaining angle on the great matters of the day. I am not sure, therefore, that it is a great idea to devote an entire posting to the bleak, bone-dry world of accounting and auditing, but I’ll give it a try all the same.

The bean-counters have, after all, attracted quite a lot of attention inside the European Commission recently. This has a lot to do with the somewhat surprising notion that accountants and auditors are a bit like those mountain gorillas in central Africa that have been dropping dead at an alarming rate in recent years. In other words, there are plenty of people who believe the profession is an endangered species that requires urgent protection.

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Visiting Berlin last week, the front page headline in Bild Zeitung transported me back to Britain 15 or even 20 years ago. "Crazy salaries," shouted the story from the newsstands, complaining about how Brussels officials earn so much more than their Berlin counterparts and listing their allegedly lavish perks.

It could have been The Sun, during the good old days. The fact is that the British tabloid has concluded that Europe is boring and frankly a lot less threatening that it used to be. The paper hardly ever puts the issue on the front page. So what’s up with the Germans?

The fact is that British euroscepticsm, while undoubtedly rooted in the country’s geography and history, was fanned by a feeling that the British system was under threat. During the 1980s and 1990s there was a sense in the right-leaning media that Brussels was trying to kill the Thatcherite revolution with ideas of "social Europe" and suffocating red tape.

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Remember the Azores "war summit" of 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war? Since that meeting on the windswept Atlantic islands the curse of Iraq has struck down most of its participants: George Bush and Tony Blair are heading out of office haunted by the unfolding disaster on the Euphrates, while Jose Maria Aznar is already gone.

But what about the fourth participant, the host Jose Manuel Barroso, the hitherto little-known Portuguese prime minister, lurking almost unnoticed on the edge of camera shot? He’s still going strong, and now as European Commission president he wants a favour returned by his old buddy, President Bush.

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Those maligned servants of the European project have been much in the news since the FT revealed the astonishing incidence of mental illness and early retirement at the European institutions, principally the executive Commission.
Some maintain it is simply a way of squeezing out difficult or incompetent staff who are very difficult to fire. If not, is there something about building Europe that produces intolerable stress? Read more in the European court of auditors’report on the subject.
Certainly, working for multinational sovereign bodies brings unique difficulties. Rates of illness at the United Nations and International Labour Organisation are not much different. All have a strict hierarchy based on grades. All have some senior managers who advance thanks to political connections rather than ability. Some EU member states weigh their influence by how many of the top jobs in Brussels their nationals hold. In contrast with private employers, the Commission holds no data on ethnic minority recruitment but tries scrupulously to balance nationalities.

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Romania and Bulgaria are almost certain to join the European Union early next year, though few in Brussels are enthusiastic about the new intake. Many governments, as well as the European Commission, worry that the two countries are not ready to join; there are widespread concerns about their records on internal security and the prospect of mass economic migration to the west.

But a small group of top Commission officials has a very special reason to dread the arrival of Romania and Bulgaria. The two countries, after all, will be able to send two new commissioners to join the current 25-strong body, which in turn means creating two new portfolios.

José Manuel Barroso, the Commission president, wants to reveal the precise nature of the new posts in the next month or so. This week, during an FT-sponsored debate with business leaders, he damped speculation that he would pull off a major reshuffle, hinting that he would make only minor changes to his line-up. All the same, the present crop of commissioners knows that Mr Barroso cannot create jobs out of thin air, but will have to tear away responsibilities from the current 25 commissioners.

Already, some of the dossiers given to smaller member states two years ago look embarrassingly thin. Jan Figel, the man in charge of Education, Training, Culture and Multilingualism, can hardly complain of having too high a profile, and neither can Joe Borg, Malta’s commissioner for fisheries and maritime affairs.

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