Six months after the death of my father Harry Leslie Smith, I read the European election results with sadness

It was an honour to watch my father go out in a final blaze of glory. Now I'm lobbying in his place

A young man cries with the head of Proactive Open Arms NGO as he leaves a rescue vessel in the Mediterranean Sea (AP)

This week, the world’s oldest rebel and my dad Harry Leslie Smith will have been dead six months. To me, it feels like only six minutes have past since he stopped breathing. His shirts still hang in his bedroom closet while the book he was reading before he was rushed to hospital sits on a table beside his favourite chair.

Since he died, the singularity of my existence spreads out towards me like the ocean tide at night. When I eat my dinner, in silence, the television as my companion, with the detritus of our life together scattered around the living room in the apartment we once shared, I become acutely aware of the hole my father’s death has torn open in my own existence.

My intense feelings of loss over my dad’s death are only natural: I was not only his caregiver for many years, but we were also best friends. I feel my father’s absence profoundly because our love, our friendship and our comradeship with each other has been amputated irrevocably by death.

I know he was 95 when he died: he had more time than my mum got, whose life ended at 70, or my brother Peter, who only made it to 50. But it still hurts, because there is no shelf life on love or loyalty. I was lucky that he lived most of his life in perfect health and that I was able to work closely together with him in his last years on his Last Stand project to make Britain and the world better for all of us. But it still feels to me like he was on this earth for just a few innings in the sun before sunset fell.

Still, it was honour to be a part of the pageant of his life and witness him go out in a blaze of glory with his indomitable efforts to make refugees welcome. It’s why I know the resurgence of Farage’s Brexit Party in the recent EU elections, along with the strong showing of Marie Le Pen in France and Matteo Salvi’s Lega Party in Italy, would have disturbed him.

Britain’s current political collapse into extreme right-wing populism and nationalism because of Theresa May’s inept ambitions to deliver a bad Brexit to the nation was one of my dad’s greatest fears before he died last autumn. He was aware that our preoccupations with Brexit were turning our politics rabid and making it harder for refugees to find sanctuary within our communities. If he were alive, I know he would have continued on with his journeys to refugee camps. That’s why I have travelled through France, Spain and Greece to break bread with refugees since he died. I tell them my dad believed Europe and Britain have an obligation to treat today’s refugees with the same care and concern that refugees were treated with at the end of the Second World War, when over 200,000 Polish refugees were settled in the UK besides thousands of others from different countries.

As Britain thrashes about in the dark political waters Brexit created, it’s apparent we’ve forgotten the plight of today’s refugees. In fact, Theresa May’s government reneged on the commitment it made in 2016 to take in 488 unaccompanied refugee children from the Calais region. After only taking in around half of its quota, the government halted transfers earlier this month, with no explanation for such cruelty.

My father and I saw how unaccompanied child refugees lived in the so-called Jungle in barbaric conditions in 2016. This winter, after my dad died, I went back to Calais and saw not much had changed for the refugees languishing there, except that they were scattered in woods or on barren industrial estates surrounding Calais, rather than in one main squatters’ encampment. It was terrible to know that in France, a country rich in wealth, human beings lived hard lives stripped of most of the essentials of civilisation, always in fear of the French police finding their campsites in early morning because then they would destroy their tents, seize their shoes and break their mobile phones.

In the last years of his life, my dad travelled tirelessly to tell people of his past. He described how he feared that we were returning to a time when ordinary humans weren’t respected and their lives were treated as if they were as cheap as chips. He believed that the British people had a spirit that was compassionate, caring and accepting of different cultures. He had seen it in the people he knew in the slums of his youth and in the soldiers of his generation who fought fascism.

I have to believe he was right, because my grief over his loss couldn’t handle mourning the death of his legacy of hope as well. Over the next six months, I will travel in my father’s place to more refugee hotspots and lobby governments to remember the greatest generation when it comes to how they deal with refugees.

Harry Leslie Smith was the author of Don't Let My Past Be Your Future, published by Little Brown. John Max Smith continues the work on Harry’s Last Stand project. You can follow him on Twitter @harryslaststand