Elections, not a moment too soon.

TO SENSITIVE souls who are about truth, modesty, and the future of their country, elections are bound to be a disagreeable business, and never more so than when the result looks like being a very close-run thing. British opinion polls over many months have shown the Conservative and Labour Parties virtually neck-and-neck, with a bunch of smaller parties--the Liberal Democrats, the Ulster Unionists, the Scottish and the Welsh Nationalists--adding to the complexity of what may happen if neither of the leading parties gains a clear majority.

Both must jump an historically high fence in order to win. The Conservatives are seeking an unprecedented fourth consecutive term in office, and the obtuse argument that "it's time for a change" will inevitably carry some weight. The Labour Party, on the other hand, needs to swing more constituencies its way than have moved in any election since 1945. The kinds of voters being most ardently wooed are not those to whom sophisticated or principled arguments are very likely to appeal. Psephologists and other political junkies described the position as "exciting."

The election campaign has been welcomed by others simply because it brings to an end the pre-elections sparring which has been continuous ever since John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher as prime minister 17 months ago. Day after day the media have treated as headline news what is plainly not news at all--the speeches of politicians attacking one another. In the name of "public service" (which is British-television-speak for giving the public what it doesn't want) there has been a steady diet of what a veteran political correspondent sourly described as "balanced propaganda."

In that sense, almost everybody will be glad to get the election over. Another cause for relief is that the country can hardly afford many more electoral bribes. The government has poured money into all manner of good and not-so-good causes, including a promise of 55 million pounds to support Manchester's implausible bid to host the Olympic Games in the year 2000. The Labour Party has lavished promises of public money on everything from industrial training to the sponsorship of "dance." The Liberal Democrats frankly admit that "a little bit more tax" would be necessary to fund their proposals.

Meanwhile, the economy is still deep in recession. Relying on Treasury forecasts, repeatedly made, repeatedly falsified, of recovery just around the corner, John Major kept postponing the election in the hope of something that would turn the opinion polls decisively in the Conservative's favor. Now he could put it off no longer.

His personal fate, or that of the Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock, is likely to be settled permanently on April 9. Mr. Kinnock and his two long-serving, uninspiring lieutenants, Roy Hattersley and Gerald Kaufman, are widely considered more of a handicap than a help to their party's chances. If they lose, they will not survive to fight again. As for Mr. Major, he is where he is for one reason only--to win the election. Those backbench Conservatives who supported the conspiracy against Mrs. Thatcher did so, not for the sake of John Major's blue eyes, but to gain (they thought) a better chance of hanging on to power. If he loses, he may well be replaced by Mrs. Thatcher's more colorful challenger, Michael Heseltine.

So the election is fateful for the two leaders. But how fateful is it for Britain? A conventional view sees the parties as less divided from each other now thatn ever before; Mrs. Thatcher's great achievement, we're told, is to have moved the center of the debate. Certainly, Neil Kinnock has striven to make his party respectable and electable by detaching it fro the wilder excesses of its left wing: but Conservatives and Socialists act and think still on the basis of quite different political assumptions. The Socialists continue to believe in the redistribution of income and in every kind of social and economic intervention, and are obliged therefore to redefine (as Roy Hattersley has openly done) the concept of freedom. They, are congenital disarmers, if no longer unilateralists, and in thrall to the labor unions. The Conservatives have proved very shaky in their championing of freedom, but at least their instincts lean that way. They have slashed the armed forces and condoned the intrusiveness of the state, but with a certain reluctance. As a columnist in the Sunday Times wrote, "All our 2 1/2 great politicl parties promise to continue with the Torries' worst policies, but both oppositions say they will make the Tories' less bad ones worse."

On the considerable matter of Britain's place in the European Community, the Conservatives under John Major have at least dragged their feet in surrendering to Brussels, whereas the Labour Party, having reversed its position completely, is eager to accept the corporatist and protectionist attitudes of the European bureaucracy.

Taxing and spending are overwhelmingly the central issue of this election: and the Labour Party's continued failure to understand the motive and mechanics of wealth-creation would positively obstruct economic recovery. The government's own record is far from impeccable. Over the past three or four years, things have gone badly wrong--but the worst mistakes, including Britain's joining of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, have been supported, not opposed, by the Labour Party.

Even under Mrs. Thatcher, the government failed to cut public spending; lower rates of income tax were more than balanced by higher Value Added Tax. Today the principles of Thatcherism--allegedly based on the careful profit-and-loss accounting of her father's shop in Grantham--are dead, as her economic advisor, Alan Walters, bitterly wrote the other day. Money has been poured into the welfare state. The poll tax, which caused riots in the streets precisely because it was fair, requiring a contribution from habitual freeloaders, has been abandoned.

If Mrs. Thatcher were still prime minister, would be Conservatives' electoral prospects be better or worse? We shall never know. Had she been available to stiffen President Bush's resolve when he flinched at the climax of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein might have been toppled and Iraq's nuclear capacity destroyed: and Mrs. Thatcher, playing Boadicea again (always her strongest role), might have won an elecction in the aftermath.

Post-Thatcher Britain eerily resembles post-Reagan America--but without the stimulus of Pat Buchanan. When Mrs. Thatcher was overthrown, the Conservative establishment sank back, with audible satisfaction, into its old woolly ways. Some achievements remain. British industry is far more competitive than it used to be: trade-union militants have lost much of their power: inflation is at least recognized as a great evil. If the Conservatives do win this election, the prospect for those of Thatcherite persuasion is mildly depressing. If they lose, the prospect is deeply depressing.

Mr. Lejeune is NR's longtime London correspondent.