Often in the past few days, BBC listeners and viewers, and readers of the unpopular newspapers, might have had the impression that Britain is discussing the pros and cons of an intervention in the Labour Party, rather than of an intervention in Syria.

As I read the papers and listened to BBC Radio 4 on Friday morning last week, I was baffled to find that the main item was not the plan for war, but the divisions on this subject within the Labour Party.

As it happens, the Tory party is also divided on the issue, as is the Tory press My newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, cautiously favoured bombing yesterday (Advent Sunday, 29th November). By contrast, our stablemate, the Daily Mail, said on Saturday 28th November that Mr Cameron had not made the case for war. Sir Max Hastings says he finds it hard to accept that bombing Syria will ‘bring us any closer to a happy ending’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3335744/MAX-HASTINGS-die-cast-going-join-bombing-Islamic-State-Syria.html. Matthew Parris, generally sympathetic to Mr Cameron, wrote in the Times on Saturday (behind a paywall) that Jeremy Corbyn was right on this issue. Careful readers of the London press will no doubt have found many other reservations about bombing among normally pro-Government publications.

And Mr Cameron is extremely nervous of risking a Parliamentary defeat, as this might severely weaken and even destroy his position. I asked a 'Whitehall source' on Monday morning if there was any word about how the government planned to whip its MPs. There was (then) none.

I might add that, until the Daily Mirror obliged on Saturday morning, showing that there was no absolute majority for bombing, but that pro-bombers were close to 50% of voters and considerably more numerous than anti-bombers (normal at the start of any conflict, alas) I’d seen no attempt to discover the state of public opinion on the matter.

I woke on Friday expecting a variety of opinion and some through coverage of the Commons debate, mentioning the strong doubts about intervention voiced by MPs from all sides.

But that morning, all four major unpopular daily papers chose virtually identical headlines, and identical angles on identical stories.

As I noted in my Sunday MoS column:

‘All the four main unpopular newspapers had virtually the same page one headline on Friday morning: The Times: ‘Labour at war over vote to bomb Isis’, The Telegraph: ‘Labour at war over Syria air strikes’; The Guardian: ‘Labour in Syria Turmoil as PM makes the case for war’; ‘The Independent’ : ‘Labour at war over air strikes in Syria’. The BBC’s headlines were very similar.

‘None of these stories contained any clear facts, just anonymous briefings. If it had been a plane crash, or a verdict in a major court case, this sort of unanimity in supposedly competing media would have been normal. But in this case it looks much more as if we have a controlled press.’

And, I might have added, a controlled BBC, which from the beginning of the destabilisation of Syria has reported the government line (a noble and spontaneous rising by liberal-minded democrats against the uniquely evil tyrant Assad) without qualification or scepticism, rarely giving time to doubters.

By the way, I am grateful to Edmund Adamus for reminding me, on Twitter, of the extraordinary interview with Lord (Paddy) Ashdown, normally a part of the interventionist establishment, on the Radio 4‘Today’ programme, here

(about 1 hr 30 mins in, but (it's interrupted by a conversation with Jeremy Bowen, for some reason) especially at 1 hour 38 mins):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06r8rx3

Lord Ashdown’s suggestions of reluctance by the Gulf States to take part in the war against ISIS, and of closeness between sections of the Tory Party and rich Arab individuals, are quite astonishing and in my view worthy of more attention than the internal struggles of the Labour Party – where Jeremy Corbyn’s bad relations with his Blairite MPs are about as surprising and newsworthy as a scowling match between Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath.

The incessant concentration, especially by the BBC in almost every bulletin I heard over the weekend, night and day, on the Labour Party’s internal strife, seems to me to be a failure of impartiality. Little of substance happened to justify the intensity and sustained continuity of this coverage. It almost all stood upon unattributable briefings received by the reporter involved. Few of these stories (in one I heard it suggested that Jeremy Corbyn might ‘force’ his MPs to vote against bombing, something he has no power to do) rose above the level of speculation.

I tried to explain, in my 2004 book ‘The Broken Compass’, later re-engineered as ‘The Cameron Delusion’, the extraordinary power which the political lobby has over the coverage of politics in this country, and of how its own interests and fixed ideas (few of them are interested in politics in the way that I am. They function much more like show business or sports reporters, whose careers are hitched to the stars they write about) ensure that some things are lavishly, intensively covered and others (often much more important) never covered at all, or barely mentioned. I explained that this was not done in ‘conspiracies’ but at lunches and dinners where people privately agreed to pursue a common interest without appearing to do so. Which sounds so much nicer and more normal than a ‘conspiracy’ but is in fact exactly the same thing.

Nobody read it, and it made no difference, as usual. And so here we are again, on the way to war, and all anyone can talk about is the Labour Whip.