Hey there! Gordon Brown is using Twitter. It's true. You can, on the Downing Street website, read a blow-by-blow account of the Prime Minister's day. If that thought isn't terrifying enough, dozens of other politicians have also signed up to the social networking site that lets users answer (in 140 letters or fewer) the question: “What are you doing now?”

The Labour Party has issued guidance to its MPs on how to tweet; there is even a website, Tweetminster, to co-ordinate the internet haikus of our political masters. “Forget the corridors of power,” it says, “you can take a back seat or you can tweet.”

Boris Johnson, Nick Clegg and Alastair Campbell are all twitterers (or should that be twits?) Even John Prescott has joined the club, revealing in one recent tweet his delight that his wife, Pauline had become a gay icon. “As Labour's cyber-warrior I am at the cutting edge of modern technology,” he wrote. It's easy to see why politicians are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. There are six million users of the online messaging service worldwide and its audience has surged 1,000 per cent in the past year. Celebrities such as Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and Lily Allen use it to communicate with their fans. Barack Obama's Twitter account has more than 265,000 followers.

In this country, middle-aged MPs hope they will look youthful and “in touch” if they use the latest web tool. But there is a slight Dad-on-the-dancefloor feel to some of their attempts. The content is all too often less twitter than witter. Is the reputation of politics really enhanced by the revelation that Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, is “snowed under with paperwork” or that Grant Shapps, the Tory housing spokesman, is “contemplating taking my eldest son to play football in the rain” or that Tom Harris, the Labour MP, “can't find the TV remote control”?

Twitter is reality TV without the pictures. There is a combination of neurosis and narcissism involved. The psychologist Oliver James has said: “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It's a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”

At Westminster, it is a symbol of a wider loss of confidence by the political class. At the very moment when leadership is required to deal with the economic downturn, politicians of all parties are frozen in the headlights of the recession. The Government is now the majority shareholder of several banks but seems to have no control over the bankers. The opposition parties are quick to criticise Labour's decisions but find it hard to say what they would do instead.

The political elite has been neutered by the collective failure to predict and prevent the credit crunch and their apparent powerlessness to reverse it now. Michael Gove, the Tory education spokesman, said in a speech last night: “It is politics itself which seems drained of moral energy, our whole system which looks worm-eaten and decayed.” And he was right. There are global new deals and there is Twitter - but what precisely is there in between?

In his recently published diaries, Chris Mullin paints a devastating picture of the trivia of a junior minister's life. At the “ministry for folding deck chairs,” as he calls his department, he divides his time between trying to ban leylandii hedges and renegotiating the contract on his official car. At one point, he is involved in setting a target for the number of people who walk to work. But No 10 decides that there are too many targets, so the word is changed to “benchmark” and then “reference indicator”. “Orwellian”, Mr Mullin notes. And of course absurd.

Many of the big political decisions have been subcontracted out by the elected representatives at Westminster. There is the Bank of England to set interest rates and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to adjudicate on drugs. There are inspectorates and targets for everything - designed to reassure the user about the reliability of the State. But, as a report from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, concludes today, in the public services “targets can be the enemy of innovation” and the audit regime has “reinforced a culture where experimentation is career-threatening, if there is scope for it at all”.

Meanwhile, the politicians compete to recruit outsiders to their cause. Labour has Sir Terence Conran as a business ambassador, the Tories have Carol Vorderman as a maths czar. Mr Brown has brought the City into his Government of all the talents; David Cameron has businessmen on his economic recovery committee. And there are endless “independent” reviews. The Treasury alone has had 43 of them since Labour came to power. Now the Tories are setting them up too. It's the equivalent of the endorsement by a “man in a white coat” used by advertisers to give scientific credibility to their product. But it is also an attempt to delay decisions and pass the buck. A vicious circle is created in which politicians think that the voters do not trust them, so they seek outside backing - which reinforces the sense that the politicians can't be trusted.

The Economic and Social Research Council will argue this week that the fall in voter turn out should be blamed not on apathy but on the conduct of politics. “Politicians offload decisions to others because they no longer trust themselves to govern effectively in the collective interest,” says Professor Gerry Stoker, who will take part in a debate for the council. “Electoral competition has increasingly been reduced to the level of a beauty contest,” adds Professor Colin Hay.

Harold Wilson once said that the Labour Party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. It is hard to imagine any of the leaders saying such a thing now. If politicians want to regain the trust of voters they must first rediscover their moral fervour.

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