Kodak once meant cameras. From the moment George Eastman launched the first Kodak camera in 1888, Kodak had a dominant market share. By the Seventies, more than 90 per cent of camera film products sold in the US were made by Kodak. People even spoke of taking family photographs as capturing that “Kodak moment”. Then came digital cameras. The established market monolith could not keep up with the new, nimble competitors. By 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy.

For generations, politics in Britain meant voting Labour or Conservative — or occasionally Lib-Dem. In election after election, these three big players took the lion’s share of votes. Now comes digital, and it is going to do to these the established monoliths what digital did to Kodak.

In Clacton last month, the Tories suffered its worst ever by-election defeat. The swing against my former party is without precedent. Things seem even more ominous for Labour. In Scotland last week new polls reveal Labour is facing defeat in seats it once took for granted.

Politics is changing dramatically, and the last people who seem to be able to see this are the professional politicos in SW1.

In the past it paid to be big in politics. Big meant having access to lots of data and being part of a powerful brand. Big meant you could pump out leaflets and messages on an industrial scale.

Digital suddenly turns many of these assumptions on their head. Digital means a level playing field. Almost anything the big corporate parties do on massive central databases can now be done on a £600 laptop. With a good desktop publishing programme and an army of volunteers, you can compete on equal terms with the Westminster machines.

In fact, I would argue that you can do campaigning even better.

The established parties are good at doing “sameness”. They churn out generic messages, and are adept at getting identikit candidates to stick to the “line to take”. But what if people prefer something more authentic?

Instead of going more authentic or “grass roots”, both Labour and the Conservatives have adapted to the new technology with more command and control. Both have imported aggressive American pollsters — Jim Messina and David Axelrod — to advise them in the run up to the general election next May. Clever move, hiring those US election gurus, eh? Too clever by half, I suspect.

Digital should mean aggregating a broader base of support. Instead Cameron and Miliband’s US polling gurus are in the business of identifying ever smaller, more precise segments of the electorate.

Political messaging, for as long as anyone can remember, has been done by professional political advisers. But you no longer need to be part of a big established party machine to get messaging right. The tools to empirically design and implement campaigns are available to those outside the big, corporate party HQs.

Evidence from Clacton and Rochester suggests that sitting in a corporate party HQ actually increases the chances of you getting things wrong. Too many of those at the top of Labour and the Conservatives have no first-hand personal experience of winning over swing voters in marginal seats. Reading what they put out in Essex and Kent, it shows.