Khan Gets a Peerage. Starmer Gets a Legacy of Broken Promises
Keir Starmer called the House of Lords indefensible and promised to abolish it. Four days before leaving Downing Street he sent it 26 new members, one of them the mayor of London, a man with no announced ambition for the place and every reason to be useful in it. This was never really about Sadiq Khan. It is about a prime minister who kept exactly one promise: to break the rest.
Starmer Promised to Abolish the Lords. His Final Act: To Add 26 Peers and One More Broken Promise
Picture it. Sir Sadiq Khan, ermine-robed, bowing to a chamber that Keir Starmer once told the BBC no honest man could defend.
In December 2022, promoting Gordon Brown’s reform report, Starmer said the House of Lords is indefensible. He went further: nobody who looked at it honestly could argue for keeping it, and Labour would tear it down and replace it with an elected chamber built around a serious democratic mission.
That was the pledge. Here is the delivery. On Thursday afternoon, Downing Street announced 26 new life peers: sixteen Labour nominations including the Mayor of London, five from the Liberal Democrats, three from the Conservatives, and two crossbench appointments, retired judge Sir Brian Leveson and former Cabinet Secretary Sir Chris Wormald. On Monday, Starmer goes to the Palace to resign. Andy Burnham takes his place. The list was published four days before the removal van.
THE ARITHMETIC OF A BROKEN PROMISE
Judge the man by the numbers, because the numbers do not spin.
The Times had reported the total at 135, based on 19 expected Labour nominations. The final list has 16. Three fewer names than forecast means the honest total is 132 peers created since Starmer entered Downing Street two years ago. Call it what it is: a prime minister who spent his opposition years accusing the Conservatives of handing out peerages to cronies, not public servants, now presiding over one of the fastest rates of patronage in modern British politics.
He said the House of Lords was indefensible, and for two years he defended nothing about it except his own right to keep filling it.
Then there is the promise he made when honesty still cost him nothing. As opposition leader in 2023, Starmer criticised Rishi Sunak for letting Boris Johnson hand honours to his own allies on the way out the door. Asked if he would do the same when his own time came, he said one word: No. This week, with just over ten days left in office, he was asked twice whether he still meant it. Twice he declined to rule out a further resignation honours list stacked on top of this one.
Consider the circumstances of his own departure: two years marred by scandal and misjudgement, hammered in May’s local elections, forced out by his own backbenchers. By his own 2023 test, difficult to justify. He has justified it anyway.
WHY KHAN: THE MUZZLE THAT DIDN’T TAKE
The Electoral Reform Society did the sums in December, when the running total stood at 96. By their count, Starmer had by then already replaced the 92 hereditary peers his own bill was removing, before a single hereditary had actually left the building. The one Lords reform he genuinely delivered, he cancelled out with his own hand. He emptied the chamber on one side and refilled it on the other, and called it change.
Start with what the peerage was actually built for, because that part is in writing. When the offer first surfaced in the spring, sources told the Financial Times it was designed to help Starmer shore up his position with patronage at a moment of real political weakness. Khan was, at that point, one of the sharpest critics inside his own tent.
So the seat was minted as a muzzle. Watch what Khan did while Downing Street reached for the ermine. In September 2025, as Burnham accused Number 10 of running a climate of fear and every loyalist in the party was demanding denunciations, Khan went on LBC and said Andy’s raising legitimate concerns, and he’s entitled to do so. Asked directly whether that meant he had ambitions of his own, he ruled out a return to the Commons and confirmed he intended to fight for a fourth term as mayor. The muzzle was offered to a man who, at the time, had already said in public he wanted none of it.
The peerage was built to buy Khan’s silence. Khan never sold it. He kept backing Burnham, and collected the seat anyway.
Read those two facts together. It arrives after the dog has already bitten. Whatever this peerage is, it was not payment for loyalty to Keir Starmer, because no such loyalty was ever on offer.
WHY NOW: BURNHAM’S MAN GETS A SEAT
Which leaves the sharper question. What does a seat in the Lords buy a man who already runs London, and whose most useful political relationship is with the man about to run the country?
The Guardian’s Pippa Crerar reported on Thursday that Khan has told Burnham he has no wish to take a ministerial job in his government, not yet. Sources close to the mayor say he is focused on the final two years of his current term and has not decided whether he will seek a fourth in 2028. Take that at face value and the peerage looks like nothing: a long-serving mayor being thanked on his way to a quiet retirement from frontline politics.
Except Khan and Burnham are not new allies improvising a friendship. Khan served in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet as shadow justice secretary; Burnham served in the same government as a serving minister. This is an old faction closing ranks, not two mayors striking up a fresh alliance of convenience. And Burnham has spent years arguing publicly that the Lords itself should be rebuilt as a senate of the regions and nations, with seats reserved for the country’s metro mayors. London, presumably, included. A man who already agrees with the incoming prime minister on how the chamber ought to be reorganised has just been handed a seat in the chamber as it currently exists. Whether that is coincidence, insurance, or the first brick of Burnham’s own reform, nobody in Westminster is saying, because nobody actually knows. That is inference, not proof. But every theory currently circulating about this appointment is inference, including Downing Street’s own.
And Downing Street’s own theory is worth examining, because it does not survive contact with the calendar. A government source briefed that Khan’s elevation is part of a routine honours list, unconnected to Starmer’s departure. Peerages of this kind are conventionally handed out in spring or autumn. This one lands four days before a prime minister leaves office. If the timing is a coincidence, it is an extraordinarily well-disciplined one.
There is a second, sharper theory, and it belongs to Europe. Khan is the loudest pro-EU voice left in Labour’s senior ranks. As recently as March he was arguing publicly that rejoining the single market would do more than anything else to ease the cost of living. Burnham, a lifelong Remainer, spent last year musing that the EU benefited this country before Makerfield forced him to bury the subject; the seat voted Leave two to one, and he won it only by refusing to relitigate the old argument. A prime minister who cannot touch the European question without detonating his own Red Wall mandate now has, sitting in the Lords, an old ally with a London-sized platform, a life peerage, and nothing left to lose. Every leader needs someone willing to say what he cannot. Whether that was the plan is unknowable. That the capability now exists is not.
Nor is Khan simply waiting for his introduction ceremony to matter. Days before the list landed, City AM reported he had privately lobbied Burnham to make Ed Miliband his chancellor, arguing Miliband had the political skill to deliver Burnham’s devolution agenda. That is not a mayor being put out to pasture. That is an old ally shaping the most consequential appointment of the new premiership before he has even taken his seat.
THE MAN WHO COLLECTS HONOURS
“It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.” ― Niccolò Machiavelli
There is an old maxim, commonly credited to Machiavelli, that it is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles. The House of Lords has run it backwards for a century: an institution that launders reputations by the act of admission, where nobody bothers asking whether the man honours the title, because the title is doing all the work.
Nobody in this story illustrates that better than Starmer himself. Queen’s Counsel at 39. A knighthood in 2014. Right Honourable on entering the Privy Council. And in Paris on Monday, at his final Coalition of the Willing summit before stepping down, Emmanuel Macron pinned the Légion d’honneur on him, France’s highest decoration, awarded for his role assembling European support for Ukraine. The following day he stayed on for the Bastille Day parade. On Monday he accepted a French honour. On Thursday he dispensed twenty-six British ones. The man who told the BBC the upper house of his own honours system was indefensible has never once, in his entire career, declined to be honoured by anyone.
Does Starmer expect anything back from Khan or Burnham? There is no evidence of an arrangement, and none is being alleged here. He insists his political career is over. But notice what the system guarantees him regardless of intent. Every former prime minister carries a standing invitation to the very benches he spent two years filling. No conspiracy is required. That is the genuine elegance of the machine: it needs no deals, because the incentives are already built into the furniture.
Even the mayor’s own peerage citation cannot resist the theatre of it. It describes Khan as the son of a bus driver and a seamstress, from a council estate to City Hall, and now to the red benches. A working class story, dressed in ermine, to justify a chamber no working person will ever sit in by right.
THE CASE FOR THE CROWN, FAIRLY STATED
Be fair to the list, because a labour movement publication should be. Alison Garnham ran the Child Poverty Action Group. Christina McAnea led UNISON. These are not cronies. This is also not, strictly, a resignation honours list; it carries Conservative, Liberal Democrat and crossbench names under the normal conventions, and Leveson and Wormald are standard establishment appointments, not political rewards.
Labour’s structural defence is real too. The Tories are currently the largest single bloc in the Lords with 246 peers to Labour’s 216, and an opposition majority in the second chamber can grind a government’s legislative programme to a halt. If you accept the Lords as it is, rebalancing it is not irrational.
Grant every word of that defence, and notice what it actually proves. “We must stuff the unelected house or the other side’s stuffing wins” is not a defence of the system. It is the indictment, recited as an alibi. The Electoral Reform Society called the pattern an endless arms race of peerages inside a chamber that dwarfs the elected Commons it is meant to scrutinise. Starmer’s answer to the arms race was to win it. The Brown Commission he personally commissioned told him to abolish the place. He kept the report and binned the recommendation.
WHAT THE LAST ACT TELLS YOU
Every premiership has a final act, and the final act is rarely an accident. Thatcher fell over the poll tax she would not abandon. Johnson fell over the parties he would not admit to. Starmer leaves handing out seats in a chamber he swore, in his own words, to demolish.
The pattern was set long before this week, and it is the real story here, not a footnote to it. The ten leadership pledges, scrubbed from his website in 2023 once most of them had already been quietly abandoned. The £28 billion green investment promise, shrunk, then buried without a press release. Abolish the Lords became remove the hereditaries, became remove the hereditaries while appointing their replacements twice over before they had even gone. There is no single broken promise here worth a headline of its own. There is a career built entirely from the same material.
The tragedy is not that Starmer broke a promise. Prime ministers break promises; that is close to the job description. The tragedy is that this particular promise cost him nothing to keep. No bond market punishes Lords abolition. No tabloid campaigns for the ermine. The only people who wanted the House of Lords to survive were the political class who always intended to retire into it. When the choice came, Starmer chose his class over his word, the same choice he made every other time, on a smaller stage.
In the end for a man that promised to abolish the House of Lords he’s done a great job of filling it…
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