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The story of this reshuffle is that the prime minister wrongly believed that she could shunt Jeremy Hunt from Health to Business, and that she could persuade Justine Greening to move from Education to Work and Pensions.
In the event, Hunt persuaded May to keep him at Health, and to give him responsibility for finding a solution to the funding crisis in social care for the elderly.
And after a couple of hours of talks in 10 Downing Street, Greening said no to Work and Pensions, and chose to return to the backbenches.
What it means is that a reshuffle that was supposed to show the prime minister back in charge, after the debacle of her general election that cost her party its majority, has instead created the impression that she doesn't have the power to configure her team in her own image,
In the case of Hunt, I am told by his close colleagues that he didn't even want to become the de facto deputy prime minister, as First Secretary, when that was rumoured as potentially his after Damian Green was sacked.
What matters about Hunt - but what seems to have been missed by May and her advisers - is that he is both the minister most committed to health of modern times, as well as the minister most loathed by NHS staff of modern times.
And as a born optimist, he remains of the view that one day NHS people will come round to the view he really is on their side.
So in 90 minutes this afternoon he persuaded the PM not only to drop her plan to move him to BEIS, but also to hand him the biggest responsibility that had been in Damian Green's brief - namely how to put the funding of social care for the elderly on a sustainable footing.
He emerged looking stronger than the PM.
As for Greening, she is not someone who has ever behaved as though she was much impressed by the trappings of office - so it was always unlikely she was going to be overjoyed to be asked to go into what are widely regarded as the Whitehall saltmines of the DWP (it is one of the hardest and most gruelling of jobs, if fantastically important).
And by the way, it won't be brilliant for the morale of the Business Secretary Greg Clark that the world now knows the PM wanted someone else in that job.
What will concern May's backbenchers is that her team - her chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, her chief whip Julian Smith - didn't do more effective preparatory work, to eliminate the risk that two of the job changes she wanted would backfire.
Not a brilliant day for Number 10 and the PM then.
But I should point out that the theory that PM's can do what they want in reshuffles is over-stated. Even Tony Blair, with his enormous majorities, never had the freedom he would have liked to create what he would have seen as his dream cabinet.
That said, right now May's cabinet looks a bit more middle-aged white male than it did - which is not the look she wanted.