Sadiq Khan got convicted of a crime this week. The crime was owning an untaxed 24-year-old Nissan Micra. The problem is that, according to City Hall — and, as of Wednesday evening, effectively the DVLA itself — the Micra was never his: someone falsely registered it in his name. You may remember this exact scheme being announced in advance, when Ulez protesters said they'd register cars in Khan's name to stick him with the charges. The scam had a press release. And now, a conviction. * Here's the Guardian's headline: 'Sadiq Khan fined over untaxed car falsely registered in his name.' Subject: Khan. Status: victim. And here's the Sun's: 'Car-hating Sadiq Khan convicted over failing to tax Nissan Micra & faces court bill… but he claims he's 'victim of scam.'' Same facts, entirely different defendant. In the Sun's version Khan is guilty in the first clause, financially cornered in the second, and merely 'claims' innocence after the ellipsis — the three-dot pause a headline takes before it winks at you. * And 'car-hating.' Not a quote, not an allegation — an epithet, bolted onto a man's name in a story about a crime he says he didn't commit, so that by the time you reach the verb he already deserves it. The first sentence doubles down: 'THE car-hating Mayor of London has been convicted.' A tax case about a scam has been dressed as karma. * Now, fairness file, because there's real stuff in it. The Sun's own article DOES contain the exculpatory material: City Hall's denial, the scam statement, even the detail that people 'threatened to register a car in his name' during the Ulez row. It's all there — in paragraph eight, downstream of the epithet, after which the piece takes a detour through Khan's greatest Ulez hits: the '£14million boost – driven by the hated fines,' Khan 'treating Londoners like walking ATMs.' The reader who bails after the headline — most readers — leaves knowing Khan was convicted and doubting the scam. The reader who finishes learns the paper knew better all along. Also in fairness: the Sun published at 9:23am, hours before the DVLA formally withdrew the case Wednesday evening. The conviction was real when they wrote it. The 'car-hating' was a choice at any hour. * What both papers agree on is the farce underneath: Khan was convicted in his absence, in a private hearing, by a magistrate in Herefordshire, under the 'single justice procedure' — the conveyor-belt system where magistrates clear hundreds of cases a day, sometimes in under a minute each. The DVLA's letters to 'Khan' were delivered to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant instead of TfL's offices. A man was criminally convicted based on mail sent to a steakhouse. * And that's the story the Guardian chose to build: its piece walks from Khan to the system — the same secretive procedure that produced 59,000 unlawful train-fare convictions, wrongly convicted children, and prosecutions of sick pensioners over household bills. Khan will be fine; he has lawyers and a press office. The pensioners on the same conveyor belt don't. The Sun looked at that machine, watched it misfire on the most famous mayor in Britain, and filed it under 'car-hating man gets bill.' * One headline saw a broken justice system catch a public figure. The other saw a chance to convict him of Ulez. The Micra, for the record, remains at large.