Politics is like a black hole. Instead of antimatter there is antipolitics, which threatens to suck all the parties into a deadly vortex.

The Irish “no” vote on the Lisbon treaty was less about qualified majority voting or the pillar system than it was a rejection of an EU political elite that seems remote and out of touch.

The loss of sensitive data by government departments fuels the perception that Whitehall is either uncaring or incompetent. The public suspicion of politicians is encouraged by stories about MPs' expenses, “whoopsadaisy” MEPs, cash-for-peerages and nannygate. The tit-for-tat dirt-spreading by the spin-doctors is a policy of mutually assured destruction.

The election of Boris Johnson as London Mayor was more a triumph for celebrity antipolitics than a victory for the Conservatives. David Davis hopes to tap into this mood in Haltemprice & Howden - although if a genuine non-Westminster figure stands he could lose to the real thing.

All the parties are finding their focus groups increasingly hostile to the ruling class. It's a vicious circle. The voters say that they want MPs to listen more - but if a politician says something that they agree with, they immediately suspect they are “only telling me what I want to hear”. If things go wrong, people blame the Government; if things go well, they are reluctant to give credit to politicians whom they mistrust. A recent Populus poll asked voters which party could best handle issues including the economy, immigration and the health service - more than a quarter said that none could make any real difference, double the proportion who replied in that way at the last election.

And yet, the politicians seem to be in denial about the scale of the problem. Yesterday, the Government published its long-awaited proposals for reforming party funding. Jack Straw promised to end the “arms race” in an attempt to restore public trust in politics. But there was nothing about capping donations from wealthy donors or the trade unions. And the limit on expenditure looks like an attempt to reduce the effect of Lord Ashcroft's money in Tory marginal seats. Sir Hayden Phillips, who chaired the independent review of party funding, told me last night that there was a danger of introducing “piecemeal” legislation when a “comprehensive settlement” was needed.

Gordon Brown promised when he first moved into No 10 that he would create a “new politics” that placed “power in the hands of people themselves”. But last week he used the oldest form of bribery in unsmoke-filled rooms to get his plan to lock up terrorist suspects without charge for 42 days through the Commons. He dare not pronounce the Lisbon treaty dead (as some of his advisers in No10 have, I am told, urged him to do) although the rules are absolutely clear that it cannot now be implemented. The impression is left that the voters of Ireland somehow got it wrong - precisely the attitude that made them vote the in way they did.

The “class war” campaign in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election was meant to pit the people's party Labour against the elitist Conservatives but it simply left the voters with the impression that all politicians were wrapped up in their own aggressive, self-obsessed world. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats are no less puerile on the campaign trail.

Politics has not caught up with how the world has changed. People shop, work, raise their children, go on holiday in a completely different way than they did 30 years ago. They share tunes on their iPods rather than buying albums from HMV, they are used to having personal recommendations on Amazon instead of following bookshops' general “Top 10”. It is not that they are apathetic about politics, but they express their opinions in different ways. Membership of political parties has halved in the last 25 years, but sales of Fairtrade coffee, free-range chickens and low-energy light bulbs have soared. More than half of Britons volunteer. People are suspicious of large institutions - banks, supermarkets, the Church, the police as well as political parties - and find a sense of identity in small family units or online communities rather than a corporate tribe.

Politics, however, is still stuck in an era when the voters were happy to doff their caps. Politicians are offering up Encyclopaedia Britannica when people are a political version of Wikipedia with entries that they can amend themselves. The Palace of Westminster is like the Royal Academy while voters are intrigued by a Banksy spraypainted on the wall outside. In a speech last week, Alan Milburn, the Blairite outrider, warned Mr Brown that Labour would only succeed if it was willing to give up centralised control of the public services. “Ours remains a ‘them and us' political system,” he said. “It was framed in an era of elitism, rulers ruled and the ruled were grateful.”

The Conservatives are toying with presenting themselves as the “anti-politics party”. MPs have been told to publish their expenses and the party has set up a fundraising network of “friends” who can give as little as they like, based on Radiohead's decision to let fans pay what they want for their latest album. More seriously, proposals to let parents set up their own schools and to devolve power to local people on crime and the NHS could be positioned as part of a smaller-government anti-politics approach. It could, however, be hard for a leader schooled at Eton and the Treasury to present himself as a scourge of the Establishment. Some senior Tories fear that the strategy would leave them looking more like a feisty opposition than a credible government-in-waiting.

David Cameron is clearly ambiguous. He once promised to end the “Punch and Judy” politics that voters so detest. He has, however been using his truncheon with increasing aggressiveness at Prime Minister's Question Time ever since.

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