Mayor Bill de Blasio was late again this morning. The Daily News reported that he arrived 15 minutes behind schedule to a St. Patrick’s Day Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. This was after he somehow managed to be equally late to a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast and reception in his own house, Gracie Mansion.

“Happy” wasn’t the word earlier this month in the Rockaways, when Mr. de Blasio was about 20 minutes late to a St. Patrick’s Day Parade, skipped half the route and got booed by the crowd.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, views ultra-Orthodox New Yorkers as a key political constituency, and he pledged to rescind the consent rule on the first day of his administration. His aides have spent months conferring with Orthodox leaders on a compromise.

The administration did not allow city health officials to speak on the record during a briefing about the new policy. Instead, reporters were asked to attribute quotations to “Official 1” and “Official 2.”

The fictions behind the mayor’s accounting include crediting the unions with savings achieved by purging insurance rolls of people who were ineligible for benefits — thereby reclaiming money that belonged to taxpayers, not to the workforce.

They also include inflating projected hikes in health insurance premiums, pressuring the city’s carriers and their state regulator to hold down increases and crediting the unions with the difference between the initial outsized projection and the final bill.

In recent days, Mr. de Blasio has sounded downcast, according to aides who have spoken with him. The manager of his mayoral campaign has returned to help. And his team is considering focus groups and a poll to refine the mayor’s message to New Yorkers who may have soured on him.

How Mr. de Blasio reached this point is a story of accumulated slights, political miscalculations and the slowness of members of his inner circle, almost none of whom have close ties to law enforcement, in reacting to the warning signs of what would become the gravest crisis of his young mayoralty.

Mr. de Blasio has made few public appearances since Officer Ramos and his partner, Officer Wenjian Liu, were fatally shot in Brooklyn on Dec. 20.

The mayor has avoided unscripted interactions with the news media, taking no questions from reporters since Monday afternoon. On Friday, his aides would not disclose his location until after 9 p.m., moments before he arrived for the final minutes of a wake and memorial service for Officer Ramos.