Blair's fatal deception

LONDON
NO ONE should ever doubt Prime Minister Tony Blair's leadership capabilities. He has the right combination of inner arrogance (friends would say conviction) and outward modesty.

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In the House of Commons he is rarely bested, and in the country at large there is a great appreciation for what eight years of his government have done in keeping the economy on the high road, repairing the rundown National Health Service, helping the poor and aged with income supplements and Africa with more aid, improving the working-class housing estates, and grappling vigorously, if not always productively, with the declining academic prowess of the state school sector.

His government has also been a good friend of the arts and of liberalizing the British culture of the stiff upper lip and the social rigidity that accompanies it. In this and a multitude of other ways, he has made the British feel upbeat about their country in a way they haven't since shortly after World War II ended, when the Labor Party led by Clement Atlee triumphed over Winston Churchill and enacted the crucial legislation that created the modern welfare state.

Still, something is not right with Blair, and the electorate, belatedly, seems to be sensing it. It is a question of character and a question of the war in Iraq, and the two are linked.

The majority of the electorate may be voting their pocketbooks but a substantial minority are preoccupied by the integrity, or rather lack of it, of the prime minister. They may be prepared to put the war behind them now that the big fighting is over and a semblance of order has returned since Iraq's elections. But they have been troubled that Blair, who has made much of his honesty and Christian faith, has been caught in a bad lie.

Did Blair lie over the reason for going to war with Iraq -- the supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction that Iraq possessed? It depends how you define lie. If you define lie as saying this cat is black when in fact it's white, he didn't lie on the big issues. But he did give the impression that the cat was assuredly black when in fact it was a sort of grayish white.

His intelligence services did seem to have the goods on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. But, as the independent reports made by a distinguished judge and former civil servant have made clear, the caveats were left out, and the presentation was polished. We in the public didn't have the unpolished version, but Blair did, and he must have known in his mind, if not his heart, that he was taking a gamble with the evidence. Why he was not prepared to persuade George Bush to wait a few more weeks until the evidence that Hans Blix, the chief UN arms inspector, was in the midst of collecting on the ground inside Iraq, was available, was totally irresponsible. Sanctions had Saddam boxed in. He was able to harm no one outside his country. The UN policing had not only led to ridding him of all the weapons of mass destruction, they had been imposed after the 1991 war, which had effectively wiped out his air force and navy and broken the back of his army.

Yet on this the word ''lie" cannot quite be used, although the Conservatives are throwing the word around. But in a related matter it can. It concerns the controversy over the naming of the Ministry of Defense's weapons expert, David Kelly, who, shortly after he was outed in the press as the source of reports claiming the government's public dossier on Iraq's weapons had been ''sexed up," committed suicide. Although an inquiry exonerated Blair of any blame for precipitating the suicide, a BBC interview two weeks ago caught Blair lying in a way we could all understand. He told the interviewer, ''I don't believe we had any option, however, but to disclose his name" to the press.

Until that interview Blair had always maintained that it was ''completely untrue" that the government had done this.

The electorate is disconcerted. This and the row over the advice given Blair by the attorney general on the legality of the war have reenergized all the doubts that the war stirred up two years ago. Many Labor supporters will be abstaining, if not voting Liberal Democrat. Even if Blair wins, his majority may be so reduced, and thus his ability to govern effectively, that he will be forced to step down in favor of Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer. Then he might recall Shakespeare's line, ''Lilies that fester smell worse than weeds."

Jonathan Power is a London-based columnist.