At the 11th hour, the British general election has finally come alive. After weeks of increasingly desperate attempts to arouse popular interest in dubious promises to cut crime or immigration and even more dubious promises to cut taxes while simultaneously increasing spending, the Conservative opposition has staked everything on the character issue: Did Prime Minister Blair lie in order to persuade the British people to support an American war in Iraq?

The election has now become, in effect, a referendum on the prime minister. The Tory leader, Michael Howard, has broken with convention by calling Mr. Blair a liar. Not many politicians can honestly claim, like President Washington, never to have told a lie – and even Washington might not have gotten away with it in his own lifetime. The convention exists to preserve the necessary fiction that politicians do not lie. Without it, there would be nothing left of the reputation of politicians in general.

It is striking that Liberal Democrat Charles Kennedy, the only one of the three main party leaders to have consistently opposed the war, does not accuse Mr. Blair of lying. Mr. Kennedy disagrees with the decision to go to war, but he accepts that Mr. Blair was sincere.

Mr. Howard, by contrast, has been inconsistent in his attitude to the war: He voted for it at the time, then appeared to change his mind when Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction could not be found, but now insists that he would have supported regime change anyway. Many Conservatives feel uncomfortable with Mr. Howard’s accusations against Mr. Blair, which have cost him the respect of, among others, President Bush. One former Tory minister, Robert Jackson, defected to Labour over this issue. But the fact that the Tory party supported the war at the time means that its campaign is necessarily ad hominem.

Thus Britain’s parliamentary election has become presidential, but there is only one candidate: the incumbent. Mr. Howard keeps telling the electorate to “send a message to Mr. Blair” – thereby in effect relinquishing his own claim to be the alternative prime minister. Even if, as polls suggest, a significant proportion of the electorate thinks Mr. Blair lied about Iraq, the same polls indicate that this is not enough to persuade them to vote for Mr. Howard. Most people made up their minds about Iraq long ago. And politics is about more than mere lie detection.

Still, it might work. In the past few days, the prime minister has been forced to defend his own integrity against new allegations arising from leaked documents. First, the attorney general’s confidential advice of March 7, 2003, expressing doubts about the legality of the war shortly before the invasion of Iraq, surfaced last week. This document had not been shown to the Cabinet or the chief of the defense staff, Admiral Boyce, at the time. Then, on Sunday, an earlier memorandum came to light, revealing that Mr. Blair had begun to prepare the ground for deposing Saddam already in mid-2002.

Neither of these leaked documents substantially alters what we knew about the buildup to war. It is no surprise that a Government law officer was worried about possible prosecution of British troops or politicians by the International Criminal Court; that, after all, is why America wisely has nothing to do with that judicial monstrosity. That Messrs. Blair and Bush had agreed on regime change in Iraq soon after September 11, 2001, was also nothing new.

These “secrets” throw no light on the question of whether the prime minister lied, but they keep the issue in the forefront of the public mind. And a substantial number of votes have already been cast: Thanks to Labor’s self-interested desire to maximize turnout, postal ballots make up some 15% of the total, despite serious concerns about electoral malpractice or outright vote-rigging. The old jokes (“vote early and vote often”) have acquired a new currency for the first time since 1832, when the Reform Act abolished “rotten” or “pocket” boroughs, where the tiny number of voters were in the pockets of local magnates and ballots were not secret. Now, self-appointed Muslim “community leaders,” often immigrants from states with no democratic tradition, can order their followers to punish pro-war candidates – and check up on them. So the virus of electoral corruption is being reintroduced into the British body politic.

No American visitor to London should miss the new production of “Julius Caesar” by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre. Shakespeare’s unsurpassed critique of demagogy is particularly appropriate for this election. Watching Ralph Fiennes as Mark Antony whipping a modern and genuinely menacing mob into a frenzy against the conspirators, I could not help thinking how much more effective was his irony – “For Brutus is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men” – than Mr. Howard’s crude accusations of lying. For eight years now, the Tories have been failing to do to Mr. Blair what Antony does to Brutus in a few minutes. And not even Mr. Blair himself would claim to be the noblest Briton of them all.

Postscript: As a schoolboy at Fettes, in Scotland, young Tony discovered the power of oratory when he was chosen to play the part of Mark Antony. Friends, Romans, and countrymen did indeed lend him their ears, and he has never looked back since. He is on course to win a third successive election this Thursday – only the second prime minister in modern times to do so. The other was Margaret Thatcher.