Leading article: This election must be about policies and not personalities

The most important issue facing voters is the handling of the economy

With the Labour Party's newly minted campaign slogan about "fairness" in place, Gordon Brown fired the starting gun in the race for the general election at the weekend, urging voters to give him a second chance and take a long, hard look at the Tories' policies.

His audience in Coventry cannot have missed the markedly confessional note that he inserted into his address in which he said: "I know – really I know – that I'm not perfect", before adding: "I know where I come from and I know what I stand for."

The Prime Minister probably felt that he had no option but to stray into what looked like uncomfortably personal territory, the start of the campaign having been overshadowed by fresh claims about his alleged character defects. No doubt the source of most of these claims are disaffected Blairites, embittered by their exclusion from Mr Brown's closed circle of confidantes and despairing of their chances of ever regaining influence in future; it was that feeling which prompted one of the remaining Blairite standard bearers, James Purnell, to announce that he was quitting his parliamentary career.

Even putting aside the latest arguments about Mr Brown's character, however, questions about his personality were always going to occupy a prominent place in this election. Indeed, the Prime Minister has helped to bring about such a state of affairs. For months he has been representing the next general election as a choice between him and David Cameron; between his "experience" of statecraft and the Conservative Party leader's lack of the same. Recently, in another attempt to profile Mr Brown's human side, we saw the Prime Minister shedding tears on television.

This all suggests that the coming election will be even more presidential in style than was the last, with even more concentration on the personal lives of the party leaders and their supposed strengths and flaws. Many people view this trend towards elections as presidential contests with dismay, seeing it as further evidence of the trivialisation of politics and of the emptying out of ideological debate. They fear the reduction of politics to banal and superficial issues. Historians note, rightly, that had this obsession with our leaders' private lives existed in the past, neither Churchill, Disraeli, nor Pitt the Younger would have got very far at Westminster. From alcoholism to chronic depression, all had the kinds of problems or eccentricities that today would rule out their holding one of the great offices of state.

This trend is not likely to be reversed any time soon, however, because it reflects a broader shift of the tectonic plates in society, away from politics generally, as it has been traditionally understood, and towards a celebrity culture. However, the fact that this trend cannot be wholly resisted does not mean we have to give in to it completely. In the weeks that remain until polling day, whenever that is, it is vital that we keep pressing all three parties on their policies.

Apart from telling his audience in Coventry that he knew "who he was", Mr Brown staked his claim to a second term as Prime Minister on his handling of the recession. Given the country's current circumstances and the dire state of the economy, we must hope that this remains the core issue throughout this campaign – not debates about whether he can control his temper, or shed tears.