At a little more than four weeks, it has not really been a protracted campaign. There will be many, however, who feel that it has lasted an eternity. It would not be a surprise if Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy are in that category. These three men have spend most of the past four months, never mind four weeks, bidding for the support of the electorate. There is nothing more that they can do but wait. Polling day is invariably the longest day of the entire contest for those who lead and represent and work on behalf of political parties.

And none of them can be certain of the outcome. The final Times/Populus poll of this general election implies this is still a race, not a procession. The Labour Party has an advantage which, if it were duplicated today, would allow it another substantial — in truth, oversized — majority in the House of Commons. There is evidence, nonetheless, of some movement away from the Government in the past few days as electors reacted to predictions of a massive Labour triumph. Mr Blair will be more than a little anxious.

This has been an odd political battle in a number of respects. The main combatants often appeared to be deliberately talking past each other. Mr Blair and Gordon Brown were determined to discuss the economy and the public services, and only referred to crime or immigration when forced to do so by their opponents. Mr Howard adopted almost the reverse approach, and felt obliged to carry the entire weight of his party’s effort on his shoulders. He may be criticised for his “one-man band” methods afterwards, but who else did the Tories have to put forward? Mr Kennedy, after a tentative opening, tried to make Iraq the centrepiece of the ballot, and traded on the ambiguity that is still a defining characteristic of his party.

Many voters would have preferred the three main parties to address all of the critical policy questions and not merely the elements that suited them. The most effective mechanism for this could have been televised debates in which the leaders were obliged to participate. These have occurred in every American presidential election since 1976 and are commonplace in most of the rest of the English-speaking world and continental Europe as well. They should be introduced here next time.

It is also very probable that the turnout at this election, as in 2001, will be well below the postwar average of 75 per cent. If so, there will be an understandable round of soul-searching and a plethora of suggestions for means to “fix” the problem. After the fiasco of postal vote reform, ministers would be wise to draw breath before implementing “solutions” that become embarrassments later. A simpler initiative would be to switch polling day away from a Thursday (an accident of history in any case) to the weekend. This would at least diminish the excuse that parts of the population failed to do their democratic duty because it would not fit into a busy schedule.

Voting should be regarded as a duty. An uninspiring campaign is not an alibi for abstention. Nor is the populist but trite charge that “they are all the same”. There are serious differences in policies and the quality of the people who would have to implement them depending on the outcome of the election. These might have been only partially exposed in the 2005 hustings; they have been signalled all the same. Now is the hour when the governed must choose who will govern them.