You can choose to clip Blair's wings

Covering the general election campaign, as I've done, away from all the Westminster static - the politicians' press conferences, the staged rallies of bussed-in supporters, the soundbite politics of the TV debates - has made it, perhaps, a bit easier to guess what the voters are thinking.

From several hundred doorstep conversations in constituencies all around London, my guess - and it is only a guess - of the electorate's centre of gravity is this. Most reject the Tories, although the immigration message is succeeding in white working-class seats.

Most want to re-elect the Government which has been modestly successful.

But they want to reduce its majority, to clip its wings. The prospect of another Blair landslide is producing pursed lips and firmly shaken heads from New Barnet to Old Coulsdon, from Catford to the Isle of Dogs.

"Democratic accountability demands that governments should not get away with their mistakes, or they'll feel free to go on making them," a teacher in the Lib-Dem target of Hornsey and Wood Green told me. A man in Brent East wanted Labour's majority cut so "there could never be another Iraq".

A woman in Croydon Central thought that the smaller the majority, the quicker Tony Blair would have to give way to Gordon Brown. Nobody seemed to think that the party's genuinely popular policies - public services and childcare, for instance - would be at risk from a smaller majority. Only the controversial ones, like ID cards, would be. Hence the growth in this election of a new phenomenon: anti-Labour tactical voting, first described in the Standard in March.

A plethora of websites - Strategic Voter, So Now Who Do We Vote For - is advising you how to conduct a wing-clipping exercise in your own seat. New Labour's last untruth of the 2001-05 parliament is that the only choice is between Blair and Howard. You cannot vote for a small majority, they say, without risking a Tory victory. In fact, as all the independent electoral experts say, this is simply nonsense.

Labour's cushion of seats is so huge that there can be no prospect of a Prime Minister Howard. The Tories have gone backwards since the start of the campaign. They are six per cent behind Labour on the latest polls. The electoral system is so stacked against them that they would need to be more than six per cent ahead to have a chance of power.

The real choice is between a Labour government with a large majority and the freedom to do as it wishes; and a Labour government with a smaller majority which is obliged to treat the public, and parliament, with a bit more respect.

Tactical voting is one way of redressing the distortions in an electoral system that creates governments with massive majorities on comparatively small shares of the vote.

If, as seems likely, Labour wins another landslide with its current average poll rating of just 38.7 per cent, that will be the lowest share ever achieved by a winning majority government in post-war history.

Only Harold Wilson, with 39.2 per cent in October 1974, came close to doing this badly - with an overall majority of four. Since then the seat boundaries and the distribution of the Labour vote have changed so much in Labour's favour that the same percentage share, on a uniform national swing, would win Mr Blair an overall majority of more than 140.

Such a result would increase alienation from politics and raise new questions about how accountable the Government is. So if you want a government with a small majority, vote for it.