Its future assured, the BBC is happy to have its news agenda set by No 10

The treatment of one story in particular this week showed the subtle nature of the corporation’s bias

At the beginning of this week, a letter was leaked. It was written to David Cameron by Rupert Soames, the chief executive of the support services company Serco. In it, Mr Soames thanked Mr Cameron for a recent meeting and told him that, with the PR boss Lord Chadlington, and the chairman of Britain Stronger in Europe, Lord Rose, he was contacting the FTSE 500 companies which had annual reports coming out in June “and persuading them that they should include Brexit in their list of key risks”.

Mr Soames sent the letter on February 8, before Mr Cameron had got the deal on which, he claimed, his advocacy of a Remain vote would hang. So the content and date of the Soames letter showed that the Prime Minister’s view did not depend on any deal, but had already been decided. The letter also showed that the chief executive of a company which has massive government contracts (and seeks more for running prisons) was plotting to help the man whose Government bestows those contracts.

Mr Soames is Winston Churchill’s grandson and brother of Sir Nicholas, MP. Lord Chadlington is brother of the euro-worshipping former Tory Cabinet minister John Selwyn Gummer (now Lord Deben), as well as being President of Mr Cameron’s constituency Conservative Association. Lord Rose was chief executive of Marks and Spencer.

I wouldn’t argue that there is a stinking scandal here. Like most of his family, Mr Soames is noisy, and has never made a secret of his dynastic pro-European views. It has been said that the Soameses are in favour of the European Union for the same reason that the Habsburgs were in favour of the Holy Roman Empire. And Lords Rose and Chadlington were, it could be argued, only doing their jobs. But it is a classic “How British government really works” story. As such, I would have expected it to lead the news.

On any other subject, it would have done. Imagine how righteous and excited the BBC would have been if Mr Soames had written to the Prime Minister promising to rustle up large companies to support fracking or the dumping of nuclear waste. But this was about Europe, so although Boris Johnson made a strong attack on big business “collusion” with Downing Street, it did not lead the Six O’Clock

News. The corporation gave Mr Soames’s letter a passing mention and concentrated instead on the man put forward for the Remain side by Downing Street that day, Lord Heseltine. Giving viewers the vague impression that he had personally fought in the Second World War, the old soldier (aged only 12 when the conflict ended) said how shocked he was that Boris had mentioned Hitler in relation to the EU referendum.

The tale of the Soames letter was buried.

Bias, you see, does not have to come in how a story is reported. It is easy for the BBC to give a Leave spokesman an apparently fair chance to respond. The key thing is the decision about what is a story in the first place. Yesterday morning, I listened to the Today programme. It ran three Europe-related stories, all cooked to the Remain recipe – the letter by luvvies in favour, a business piece about Eurostar which gave its boss the chance to oppose Brexit, and an item about all the public money rolling into Manchester thanks to the European Investment Bank.

Now that the BBC – also because of referendum timing – has won its battle with the Government about its own future, it is on side. Between now and June 23, it is letting its agenda be set by the Downing Street media team.

This is true not only in the reporting, but also in the wrangle about who appears on what. The Electoral Commission has officially designated Vote Leave as the most representative grouping on its side, so in the proposed Town Hall programme (in which each side’s leader appears, but does not debate directly with the other), Leave and Remain should choose whom to put up. Yet the BBC, so anxious, for its ratings, to get Mr Cameron on, is likely to indulge his demand that no Tory should appear against him. If it does so, it would be rejecting Leave’s choice – Michael Gove – and letting the Remain side fix the rules.

There is a deeper sense in which things are fixed. It is in the choice of what matters. In the campaign so far, television and radio news coverage have concentrated on two things – instructions from important people and organisations about how we should vote, and warnings about how we shall suffer economically if we leave.

Both are worth reporting. But I cannot think of any other electoral contest in which “Don’t you dare” messages from powerful foreigners are seen as central. As for the economic warnings, they are almost all about transitional effects rather than longer-term trends. It matters quite extraordinarily little to our national future whether the value of the pound drops (or rises) for a few weeks, but it matters a lot that the national currency is guided on a sound path. And it is simply untrue that a Leave vote on June 23 necessarily involves an immediate two-year negotiation, after which, without a trade deal, no European will buy our goods and services.

The same applies to the receipt of grants. Obviously, anyone who gets money from the EU doesn’t want to lose it, but since Britain pays getting on for twice what it takes out, we are, on average, losers. At present, I learn from parents of students on the EU’s Erasmus exchange programme, you know when their grants have been paid out in the autumn, because your children turn up wearing nice new coats they have bought on the proceeds. If we were out, we could decide what to do with the money saved. Obviously, the Leave campaign cannot guarantee that nice new coats for students would be considered a top priority by future British governments. But what can be confidently asserted is that there would be more money for coats (if that is what voters wanted) or anything else.

Besides, the real economic question for the voter is “Will I and my family be better-off overall?” This involves lots of factors – the strain on the NHS, schools and housing lists caused by uncontrolled immigration, for example, as well as trade with one part of one continent. These have barely been discussed on the telly.

Then there is the little matter of how we are governed and by whom, under what law and which judges. This is sometimes well done in feature programmes – Jeremy Paxman had quite a good go on Thursday night, for example. But it is scarcely considered news at all, though polls show it is one of the three biggest issues with voters.

Mr Cameron, who, until this year, either disparaged the EU or avoided the subject, should now tell us what its great achievements in the 21st century have so far been. Then he should say what its next great ones are likely to be. Go on, BBC, ask him. If we vote Remain without getting good answers, I predict a surge of remorse.