Over the past two and a half years, one issue above all has dominated the political agenda - the question of whether Tony Blair misled the country when he took us to war in Iraq. So there was a certain inevitably about the fact that, in the end, it would become the central issue of the 2005 General Election campaign. All the talk about the economy, immigration, council tax, hospital superbugs and anti-social behaviour was, it seems, but a prelude to the real thing. This election is, fundamentally, a referendum on the Prime Minister himself and, as I wrote in last week's column, it is he, not his party, on which the voters will ultimately have to make a judgment. General elections are, at the end of the day, a blunt instrument for reflecting the public's hopes and aspirations. But the eternal dilemma over whether to vote for the policies you like best or the person you trust most has been thrown into particularly sharp relief by this particular campaign. In the course of the first two weeks, Labour by and large won the policy argument, successfully portraying the Conservatives' economic plans as incoherent and ill-thought-out. But it is now paying the price of going into the election with a leader irrevocably damaged by the war and its aftermath, rather than one who could have enabled the party to move on. Of the week's events that have brought the "trust" issue back into the spotlight, by far the most entertaining was the former MP Brian Sedgemore's defection to the Liberal Democrats. "The problem with Tony Blair is that he tells big porkies as easily as he tells little porkies, whether it is watching Jackie Milburn play football or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," he said memorably. It was followed by the leak, and eventual publication, of the Attorney General's March 2003 advice on the legality of the war in which he appeared to change his mind from one week to the next. It did not prove Mr Blair "lied," but like the Butler Report on the use of intelligence, it did show that Parliament, the public and even the Cabinet were told less than the full story. But if there was a pivotal moment for me in this campaign when the trust issue leaped out at us, it was Mr Blair's interview with the BBC's Jeremy Paxman 10 days ago. In the course of that interview, Mr Blair said the Government had "no option" but to release the name of Dr David Kelly, the MoD weapons scientist who took his life in 2003 after being exposed as a BBC mole. This directly contradicted his earlier assertion in the aftermath of the tragedy that he "emphatically did not authorise the leaking of Dr Kelly's name." To have dreamed up a whimsical story about watching Jackie Milburn as a two-year-old is one thing - but to have misled the country on something as important as this is quite another. As Sir Jeremy Beecham would no doubt remind us all if I did not do so first, Tony Blair has done many good things for this country over the past eight years. Notably he has turned around years of Tory under-investment in schools and hospitals, introduced a minimum wage, devolved power to Scotland and Wales, and quietly redistributed billions to the less well-off. But however much good he has done, someone who cannot be straight with the British public is not, in my view, fit to be our Prime Minister. Mr Blair defends his actions on the grounds that Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein - but he cannot seem to understand that it was not so much the war that was wrong as the way the country was inveigled into it. For all his protestations about negative campaigning, it is clear that Mr Blair's strongest remaining argument for staying in Number 10 is that he is not Michael Howard. Over the forthcoming days, there will be a huge effort to get Labour's vote out by raising the spectre of the Tory bogeyman getting into Downing Street by the back door. If there were a genuine chance of that happening, I myself might be swayed by that argument - but there is not. The Tories are not now going to achieve the substantial lead in the share of the vote they will need to win a majority under present electoral boundaries, and for them, it's back to the drawing board. But as for Labour - I come back again to the comment made to me early last year by a North-East MP anxious at the impact the "trust" issue was having on the party. "There is really only one way now that we can draw a line under the Iraq issue and move on, and that is the resignation of the Prime Minister," he said. His logic was impeccable - but Mr Blair did not resign, staying on even at the risk that Labour's election hopes might be sacrificed on the altar of his ego. Even more ludicrously, he planned to marginalize and even sack Labour's greatest asset, Gordon Brown, until at the very last moment he realised how much he needed him. For some time now, I have been arguing that this election has to be seen as an opportunity to bring about regime change in this country. Earlier this year I set out a means by which, through tactical voting for the Lib Dems, Labour's majority could be reduced to a level at which a change of leadership would be accelerated. Labour has been right in this election to say that Britain needs to go forward, not back to the failed policies of the Tory years. But it now needs to go forward under a new leader who can re-establish that vital bond of trust between an increasingly despised political elite and an increasingly disenchanted public. | 
