No one should ever doubt British Prime Minister Tony Blair's leadership capabilities. He has the right combination of inner arrogance (friends would say conviction) and outward modesty. In Parliament, he is rarely outdone and, around the nation, 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 working-class housing estates, and grappling with the declining academic prowess of the state school sector.
His government has also been a good friend of the arts and of liberalising 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. Still, something is not right with Mr Blair, and the electorate, belatedly, seems to be sensing it. It is a question of character and it is a question of the war in Iraq - and the two are linked.
A substantial minority of the electorate is preoccupied with Mr Blair's integrity, or rather lack of it. They may be prepared to put the Iraq war itself behind them, now that the big fighting is over and a semblance of order is returning. But they have been troubled that Mr Blair, who has made much of his honesty and Christian faith, has been caught out in a bad lie.
Did he lie over the reason for going to war - the supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction that Iraq possessed? It depends how you define 'lie'. If you define it as saying that this cat is black when, in fact, it is white, then he did not lie on the big issues. But what he did do was to give the impression that the cat was assuredly black, when in fact it was a sort of greyish white. His intelligence services did seem to have the goods on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. But as the independent reports by a distinguished judge and former civil servant have made clear, the caveats were left out and the presentation was polished.
We, the public, did not have the pre-polished version, but Mr Blair did and he must have known that he was taking a gamble. It was totally irresponsible that he was not prepared to persuade US President George W. Bush to wait a few more weeks until the evidence was available that Hans Blix - the chief UN arms inspector - was collecting on the ground in Iraq.
Yet on this, the word 'lie' cannot quite be used, although the Conservatives have been throwing it around. But in a related matter, it can. It concerns the controversy over the naming of the Ministry of Defence weapons' expert, David Kelly. He committed suicide shortly after he was revealed in the press as the source of reports claiming the government's public dossier on Iraq's weapons had been 'sexed up'. Although an inquiry exonerated Mr Blair of any blame for precipitating the suicide, a BBC interview two weeks ago caught him out lying in a way that we could all understand. He said: 'I don't believe we had any option, however, but to disclose his name [to the press].'
