A peerage for Sadiq Khan is demonstrative of everything wrong with politics - Sarah Todd

A school visit to London, aged about ten, has remained a favourite childhood memory. Our own children have all gone at about the same age, the first to see War Horse at the theatre and the second to take part in a scout harvest festival at Westminster Abbey.

This country’s capital city is not somewhere, under the current Mayor’s rule, that most families would surely feel entirely comfortable packing their young children off to now.

There were some pictures in the newspaper the other day of rough sleepers among the rubbish on Oxford Street, outside the main entrance to the flagship Marks and Spencer store.

For somebody who hasn’t bothered with visiting the capital for a fair few years, how sad to realise that an area that was once iconic now looks so down-at-heel.

Rough sleeping is a disgrace. None more so than the estimated five per cent in London who are army veterans. Also nothing to be proud of is the number who are care leavers - youngsters who have previously been in the system - along with those whose last address was at His Majesty’s pleasure in prison.

The late politician Ann Widdecombe, who served for the Conservatives as Minister of State for Prisons and was Reform UK’s current justice spokesperson, often warned about the importance of finding emergency accommodation to house inmates on their release “at all costs.”

Our country’s trend towards early release might sound wonderful for those offenders who are let loose, but it must be the exact opposite if they have nowhere to live and find themselves out on the streets where the temptation to return to a life of crime must be around every corner - or in every doorway.

Around 46 per cent of those on the streets in London are sadly first-time rough sleepers and many of their stories - a marriage break-up, losing a job and getting behind with the rent, a business going bankrupt, falling out with parents - are all situations that anybody we know could find themselves in.

While everybody’s plight pulls on the old heartstrings, our country will continue going down the drain until it goes back to basics and concentrates on domestic issues before taking on the wider world’s problems.

Getting a grip on local councils - or more specifically the daft money they are wasting - would be a good starting point.

Over the weekend the Mail on Sunday did an excellent piece exposing the scandal of children receiving thousands of pounds in compensation claims after sustaining injuries that their parents and grandparents would surely have brushed off as part of the normal rough and tumble of growing up, such as being hit by tennis balls and tripping over tree roots.

The feature found five-figure sums were paid to children who injured themselves in playground falls and PE lessons, such as tripping on astroturf or being accidently clobbered by a hockey stick. One pupil was awarded £4,000 after burning their lip on a toasted marshmallow, another £20,000 when they tripped while running towards a bouncy castle.

It quoted Shimeon Lee, policy analyst at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, saying: “Serious negligence deserves compensation, but some of these pay-outs will leave taxpayers baffled.

“Councils must prevent genuine safety failures without encouraging a compensation culture around ordinary accidents.”

Figures from local councils reveal £3.75m was paid out in the past two years after 6,000 cases in which schools were sued by parents over what campaigners called out as ‘ordinary childhood accidents’.

Heaven knows what those claimants would make of this correspondent’s schooldays, back in the days of that first trip to London.

In summer we rode our bikes the four miles to school and when it snowed, we spent the afternoons sledding down the hills on plastic fertiliser bags. Anyone who fell off either - bike or bag - jumped up quickly for fear of being branded a cry-baby.