Last year I had the privilege of listening to a senior Labour figure telling a small audience how to do political communication. He was charming, forthright, and clear. The (Conservative) peer who had arranged the evening told us afterwards that we had just heard a “masterclass”.

And indeed we had: providing you had no deep commitment to democracy.

The strategy had been all about simplicity and clarity, discipline and reiteration. A small coterie would decide what the policy was and how it was to be communicated and then everyone else, from cabinet minsters downwards, was to hammer away at it without hesitation or deviation, but with an awful lot of repetition.

It worked, in as far as it turned New Labour into an unprecedentedly successful election winning machine, but it effectively disenfranchised everyone else who was committed to the Labour cause. Their duty was to implement the strategy devised for them by a tiny group of party seniors. Labour activists tolerated this, just, because Blair kept on winning elections, but the grassroots/ party HQ relationship was never an easy one, and the longer-term consequences to commitment and trust, without which democratic politics withers, was deleterious.

David Cameron is going through similar travails at the moment. His recent e-mail to party members, reassuring them of his pride in their work and his “deep and lasting friendship” with them, was both bizarre and humiliating.

The immediate cause was the alleged comment made by one his team that the Tory grassroots were “mad, swivel-eyed loons”, but this was only a cipher for a much wider sense of disconnection between Westminster and the shires. It may ‘only’ be over Europe and gay marriage, issues that are so obvious among urban elites that many view those who think otherwise as genuine moral retards, or worse – but the gap between party and leader(s) has become a chasm. The fact Cameron has to say he appreciates their work is reasonably good evidence that he doesn’t. And as soon as you find yourself having to deny that your immediate circle sneers at grass roots commitment…

We are back in New Labour territory here. Party leaders lead; party activists follow, wherever. Indeed, some have remarked that Cameron has taken his willingness to treat activists like canon fodder, taking their efforts for granted and ignoring their views, directly from Blair.

The difference, of course, is that Blair won three elections convincingly. Like an abused partner, Labour activists were willing to stay with him because no matter how he treated them, he did at least provide for the family. Cameron has yet to win one. No wonder activists feel ill-treated and with no commensurate compensation.

This spat, like many before it, will pass without notice or impact, but the background problem remains and is more concerning. It is a thin view of democracy that sees it simply as people voting for leaders. A fuller and surely better reading is that it is a mechanism for self-government, for allowing those concerns that really motivate people – not simply to sign an e-petition, but to join, pay subs, attend events, deliver leaflets, knock doors, propose solutions, agitate for action, shape policies, etc – to shape society. The cumulative effect of disregard and even contempt for grassroots activism, on both sides of the political divide, is to erode this latter sense. We are in danger of honouring the letter of the democratic law, while we dishonour its spirit.

Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos