British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has named London Mayor Sadiq Khan as one of 26 individuals appointed to the House of Lords, in one of his final acts before stepping down. The UK government announced the appointments on Thursday, July 16, 2026, including senior figures from politics, philanthropy, social action, the military, and business.

Sadiq Khan, a former Labour MP for Tooting, is currently midway through his third term as London mayor, having first been elected in 2016. His appointment to the House of Lords comes just days before Andy Burnham is expected to succeed Starmer as Labour leader on Friday, July 17, and as UK prime minister on Monday, July 20.

Of the 26 new peers, 16 were nominated by Labour, five by the Liberal Democrats, three by the Conservatives, and two are crossbench peers with no party affiliation. Labour’s nominees include human rights campaigners Parvais Jabbar and Saul Lehrfreund, cofounders of the Death Penalty Project, and Cathy Ashley, a families’ rights advocate and former head of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Among the crossbench peers is former senior judge Sir Brian Leveson, who led the 2011 Leveson Inquiry into the conduct of the British press following the phone-hacking controversy.

Before these appointments, the Conservatives held 246 seats in the House of Lords, while Labour held 216, giving the opposition a numerical advantage in the upper chamber. As life peers, Khan and the others will be able to scrutinise, revise, and vote on UK legislation.

Sources

Al Jazeera