With four days left in the job, Keir Starmer handed out 26 seats in the House of Lords, Sadiq Khan headlining. The Guardian put it the way grammar intended: "Keir Starmer makes Sadiq Khan a peer in the House of Lords." Subject, verb, object. A man did a thing. * The BBC's headline on the exact same list: "Sadiq Khan among 26 new peers to enter the Lords." Read it twice and try to find Starmer. You can't — he's not in it. The peers just... enter, the way pollen enters your window. Nobody appointed anybody. Twenty-six people were strolling past Parliament and the building absorbed them. * To be fair: the BBC's first sentence does call the list "one of Sir Keir Starmer's last acts as prime minister." The actor exists — one floor below the headline, where fewer people scroll. The headline itself describes a patronage decision the way you'd describe a tide. * Then paragraphs eight and nine hand the mic to "a government source," who calls Khan "a brilliant mayor who has transformed London for the better," rates the peerage "thoroughly deserved," and runs through his greatest hits: crime down, air cleaned, Elizabeth Line delivered, council homes built. That is not a news paragraph. That is a campaign leaflet wearing the BBC's font. The only pushback in the piece comes from Nigel Farage, which is less a counterweight than a casting choice. * And here's the load-bearing sentence: "The BBC has been told" the list was already in the works before Starmer resigned — told by whom, it doesn't say — before flatly filing it under "political peerages" rather than resignation honours. That distinction, four days before a resignation, matters enormously to exactly one group of people: the ones handing out the peerages. They appear to be the same people doing the telling. * The receipt turns up in paragraph 14: Starmer said in 2023 he found handing out such awards "very hard to justify." Three years later there's a list with 26 names on it, a briefing explaining why this doesn't count, and a headline he isn't in. Awards get much easier to justify when the headline can't see who's giving them.