Bo, who in his youth was a Red Guard, has made a real splash during his four years in Chongqing, winding up popular support by leading a furious assault on alleged gangsters and corruption, and encouraging the revival of "red songs" praising Mao.
He brought from Liaoning his police chief there, Wang Lijun, who became deputy mayor and police boss in Chongqing.
But recently there has been a calamitous falling-out between the comrades, leading Wang, who had been shifted sideways from his high-profile police role, to drive through the mountains west to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, where he spent a day in the American consulate.
No one really knows why he went there - to seek asylum, some have claimed - or what he talked about, although the rumour mill is working overtime. Perhaps a transcript will emerge in time on WikiLeaks.
But Wang left, and is now, it is believed, being questioned by the authorities in Beijing. He is formally said to be undergoing "vacation therapy", a phrase that has swiftly acquired a life of its own on the Chinese internet.
Thus the prospect of Bo, the poster-boy of China's earnest nationalists, joining the PSC appears to have suffered a setback.
In comparison, Bo's predecessor in Chongqing, Wang Yang, who became party secretary of the industrial powerhouse province of Guangdong, next to Hong Kong, seems to be on his way up in to the politburo.
Wang is an economic reformer who is leading the liberalisers in the Deng tradition. But he won't be expected to broaden his mandate into social and political liberalisation.
That would be a step too far for a party 62 years in power, whose instincts have inevitably become conservative and cautious.
