AS voters go into the privacy of the polling booths today, there will be much holding of noses. Because whichever party you vote for has a slightly unpleasant whiff surrounding it.

This is an election shrouded in the fog of war. And - forgive another clich - truth is always the first casualty of war. During this campaign, we've had so much turgid fighting over the same ground that many people have either switched off or forgotten what the war was about.

This election battle has ended with all three of the main parties in a pickle.

Tony Blair, the man who said he would be "whiter than white", is widely believed to have lied over the war. However, his biggest crime is that, once again, he resorted to spin to convince us of the need to go to war. Rather than lay before the country all the complex facts and detailed arguments, he opted for one clearly understood soundbite: weapons could be upon us within 45 minutes.

It won the day, but when those weapons failed to turn up, Mr Blair's spin unravelled, and history beckons for him as the Prime Minister who took the country into an unpopular war without fully explaining why he was doing it.

The Conservatives have called him "a liar" for his handling of the legal advice - although the belated publication of Lord Goldsmith's analysis doesn't bear this out - and yet say that they would have gone to war to change the regime in Iraq. This would have broken every international law.

The Liberal Democrats' popular anti-war stance would have done little to solve a crisis where Saddam Hussein had broken the sternest United Nations resolutions and America had unilaterally amassed half a million troops to take him on. Indeed, the Lib Dems' popular stance of pulling British troops out at the end of the year will do little to solve the crisis that we have just made.

And so the fog of war descends. Saddam is gone, his evil regime removed and the thousands of lives of his own people that he would have snuffed out have been saved. Plus, Iraq is now a democracy.

Yet 25,000 civilians died, at least double that number were injured and 87 British troops have been killed. And introducing democracy to Iraq is proving a lengthy, bloody process with no obvious conclusion.

Was it worth it? There is no black and white answer, so it is therefore not possible to vote with a clear conscience for any of the parties on their war records. Instead, most people will clutch their noses and vote for the one with the least worst domestic agenda.

And, let's also remember that, while this may seem like a presidential election, we are voting for a party, not just for a leader. We have to look beyond Mr Blair and see that we will probably get Gordon Brown in a couple of years time; we have to look beyond Michael Howard and see that we might end up with a Cabinet with John Redwood in it and Oliver Letwin running the economy; we have to look beyond Charles Kennedy and wonder whether the LibDems really do have sufficient people of sufficient calibre to form a government.

Then we have to question the campaigns - none of which, it must be admitted, has been particularly inspiring.

The LibDems' has been the easiest, both on the ear and to conduct. They are against everything that is unpopular. Anti-war, anti-tuition fees, anti-council tax. Hurrah!

But they offer a schizophrenic vision. On the one hand, to appeal to Conservatives, they call themselves "the real alternative" (and, indeed, they have been more of an opposition to Mr Blair in the last Parliament than the Tories). But on the other, to appeal to old Labour supporters, they parade very left-wing converts like Brian Sedgemore and boast about higher taxes for middle and higher earners.

Can they really be all things to all people?

So to the Conservatives, who have succeeded in setting the agenda for much of the campaign. But it was a limited agenda, based largely on fear. Fear of gipsies and immigrants; fear of catching a superbug in an NHS hospital; fear of your local school being ruined by ill-disciplined children.

By concentrating on such narrow fears as MRSA, they never got round to explaining how their patient passport system would work in the wider health service. By concentrating on such narrow fears as ill-disciplined children, they never got round to explaining how their school voucher system would help anyone but the better-off.

And they never quite explained well enough how you can cut taxes on day one by making long-term efficiency savings and still spend the same as Labour on public services.

Were they thinking what you were thinking? The difficulty is, we don't know enough of what they were thinking, except that an undercurrent of nastiness may still appeal to core Tory voters.

Finally, to Labour. What campaign? For three weeks, Mr Blair has been on the ropes, pummelled until he's black and blue about Iraq.

In between, it seems to have been a vague promise of more of the same only with a little more Gordon and a little less Tony. And in between, it seems to have been a desperate plea to forget about the side noises made by the supposed feud between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister, and the supposed breach of trust over issues like tuition fees and even foxhunting, and to judge Labour on what it has achieved.

Our front page headline on the day Mr Blair won his second term as Prime Minister was "Time To Deliver", and the votes of many will hang on whether he has indeed done that.

On health, there is clear evidence of meaningful progress, typified by our own campaign to reduce waiting times for heart bypass operations, which have fallen from an average of a year, to a maximum of three months in the past six years. Not perfect but better.

Experienced, dedicated teachers tell us that classroom resources are the best they have known, although concerns remain about levels of bureaucracy. Not perfect but better.

The minimum wage, which cynics warned would destroy business, has been successfully introduced; the economy has been consistently strong; interest rates have been kept low, and - despite the on-going problems with the manufacturing industry - unemployment has fallen to a level which could only have been dreamed of not so long ago.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether the Government has over-stretched the nation's resources to deliver this unprecedented increase in public spending, but the proof of delivery is there.

So we won't be expecting many changes to the Labour-dominated map of the North-East.

One final nose-clutch: the electoral system. It means that votes are wasted in the North-East. There's very little point voting in Easington or Richmond - the reasons are the same, only the dominance is different. If we are serious about making everyone want to participate, then we have to try to ensure that everyone's vote counts in some way.

But then, this is an imperfect system which probably suits an imperfect election where the campaigns have been lacklustre and the electorate has been uninterested.

So, with your nose firmly clutched, please make sure you vote for the least imperfect candidate of them all.