The winner takes all while losers face oblivion in the modern game of politics

The traditional analysis of swings to the left or right around a basic struggle for the centre no longer seems to apply

Should you feel sorry for the Tory party – and it is difficult not to at the moment – think of the poor Democrats in the US. Two years ago they lost an election by a couple of dimpled chads. In the mid-term elections this week they should have been just as close, if not victors. Yet now they are a party defeated, dispersed and disillusioned. Without a natural leader, few give them a chance even to challenge President Bush in the next election. Like the Republicans during Clinton's presidency, or the Democrats during Reagan's, they have been cast into the uttermost depths of irrelevancy.

And you can say the same of the opposition in France and Spain. The French Socialist party has not just lost the election against Chirac, it has been thrown on to the Tory-type margins of accelerating loss of public support and intensifying internecine warfare. Only in Germany is there any sense that we are still in a two-horse race for the electoral stakes.

None of the traditional explanations for this world of "winner takes all" seem to work. The analysis of swings to the left or the right around a basic struggle for the centre doesn't seem to apply. If that was what we were witnessing, then the Tories wouldn't be facing wipe-out in Britain, nor would the conservatives have been massacred in Canada. There have always been exceptions to general swings, but not this see-saw of oblivion.

You can't put it down entirely to an unideological age kept sweet by the cash registers of economic growth. The economies of the Western states are not in good shape. All the surveys suggest that, even in America, the consumer has become extremely nervous. By the normal law that votes follow the graphs of disposable income, Gerhard Schröder, the German leader, should have been out on his ear in Germany, and America should have seen a sizeable protest vote in the mid-term elections. Neither happened.

Nor is there a shortage of hard issues on which opinions are deeply divided. Just the opposite. The prospect of waging war against Iraq has brought out passionate politicking. Mr Schröder probably wouldn't have kept power without it. In the US mid-term elections, no one was in any doubt that the Republicans were offering a hard-line rightist agenda on the environment, health and welfare – all the traditional issues for which the threatened interest groups would be expected to turn out in force. They didn't.

No, you can't explain the misfortunes of the losers in today's politics on the pre-emption of the centre by governing parties. If that were so Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister who has made anti-union business-friendly economics the core of his agenda, wouldn't be riding high, and nor would President Bush in the United States. What we are seeing here is a quite different phenomenon, the rise and rise of managerial politics.

Elections, politics indeed, have been reduced to a spectator sport in which the excitement is in the race when it is close and disappears once there is a result. Like a successful football team, the winner tries to build on success by taking in all the best players and building the best facilities. The loser, its sponsorship slipping, faces the prospect of a vicious cycle of decline in receipts, talent and attendances that drives it out of the league altogether. By-elections, mid-term elections and European contests attract such a poor turnout because they don't make any difference to the results of the main event.

Party membership – the fans willing to turn out – has been on the decline for years, decades in truth. It is partly the weakening of class. Broad national parties representing sectional interests are a thing of the past. More precise associations representing the extremes, left or right, and the very specific are taking their place – anti-immigrant parties, car owners, whoever feels threatened by particular developments. As the game has moved from the pitch of the public meeting to the television camera, so the viewer no longer feels the need to express his team support by personal and financial commitment.

But it has not only been membership dues that have been affected. The Labour Party was sustained during the lean years of the early thirties, the fifties and the eighties by unions who saw their direct interests as requiring party representation. In the same way, the Tory party received large sums from businesses and entrepreneurs who felt the need to protect themselves against "socialism".

Now that we no longer have socialism and New Labour no longer sees its interests in protecting union members, then the sources of both parties' finances have begun to dry up. Instead we have, as in the United States, large donations from individuals and groups seeking personal and particular advantage. In the case of donors such as Rupert Murdoch, it's freedom from regulation, in the case of Lord Sainsbury and Lord Levy, it's buying yourself a position at the centre of power.

The effect is to exaggerate greatly the natural swings of fortune. When you're in power, the money rolls in. When you're out, your funds quickly dry up. Without the glue of either continuous sectorally based finance and membership, you are forced to seek support from very specific interests (motor racing, for example, or house construction) that are there only for a purpose and fall away when their reasons do. Hence the purpose of government becomes not so much to hold the centre but to keep buying off potential enemies, a process of ever greater inclusivity and patronage that we see in New Labour.

The bad news for parties is that when they lose, they're immediately in trouble. There's nothing that holds them in position. The good news is that, without ideology, there's nothing absolute that prevents them getting back in the game if you can look as if you've built up a winning team again. So, if the Tories get a new manager and first-class players, they could start moving up the opinion polls, which would start bringing in the money, which would in turn up their exposure. Equally, should New Labour lose power through accident, economic mismanagement or a war gone wrong, it is perfectly possible to see it down to 100 seats and out of power for a generation. Ideology, policies, even underlying unity are of secondary importance. The skills are those of corporate marketing – image, sales and management.

There are ways of making the race more exciting. The US system of putting a ceiling of two successive terms on presidents gives the other horse a chance. Without it, Clinton would still be in power. You can change the financial rules of the game, with state financing, but there is no sign that the public would prefer to pay for a sport they regard as worth it only if free.

You can blame the voters for this, or the politicians, or the culture of our times. But what you can't surely do is feel complacent about a political system that does so little to reflect the real concerns and tensions beginning to stir in the world.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk