A tribute to my dad

I HAVE been neglecting the campaign trail for a few days now, the reason being that my dad died yesterday.
My dad, Bryan Thorne, had been in St Margaret’s Somerset Hospice, Taunton, after falling badly at home and suffering a knock on his head.
The fall triggered the end of his battle with cancer, which began in February, 2007, and seemed to have been won after undergoing emergency surgery to remove a large tumour from his bowel.
However, about 12 months ago, it became a battle with liver cancer and we were told it was inoperable and the end result was inevitable.
After the fall last week, my mother could no longer continue to care for him at home and it was agreed the only course open was to admit him to the hospice.
We were told he might last no more than a few days, but he held on for six days in total and passed away shortly before 9 am yesterday. He was 79 years old.
As the eldest of his five children, I was with him holding his hand at the end.
It is the most distressing and emotionally disturbing thing I have ever, ever, ever had to do.
Many of you reading this will probably have already gone through something similar in losing a loved one.
I now know how you felt and how you may still feel today.
I write this not for sympathy, rather just to try to clear my mind and try to refocus on the next few weeks.
My dad would have been upset if he knew he had disrupted my campaign. He always only ever wanted me to succeed in anything I did, and was always willing to help if he could.
I know my dad was very proud of me being a councillor although he was never a Conservative.
My dad was a lifelong Labour supporter, even defending Gordon Brown because he thought he was a Labour Prime Minister.
He said he would never vote Tory because of what happened in Suez in 1956. I could never understand the logic of his attitude.
My family have a tradition of helping others, a tradition steeped in trade unionism and I have been told accounts of my great-grandfather handing out union money to workers to help them through the hardship of strike action while they fought for a better quality of life.
In my younger working days I was also a trade union officer, albeit a right-wing one and often I found myself voting in a minority of one.
It therefore surprised my dad when, in the autumn of 2006, I told him I was standing as a Conservative candidate in the Taunton Deane Borough Council elections of May, 2007.
But he knew that in my own way I would be doing my best to help people, like generations of my family before me, and he supported me fully, despite the arguments we would have when talking politics between ourselves.
He often used to really annoy me with his attitude and it would require my mum to intervene and get us talking about something else.
Football was my dad’s passion, and he was a lifelong Arsenal fan.
Being a Liverpool fan myself, there were again many heated discussions - much more so than when talking about politics. One thing we had in common, however, was that we both disliked Man Utd.
He served in Navy and was stationed in Malta for some years, and my younger brother was born there.
In his latter years, my dad would take my mum back to Malta for holidays, staying several weeks at a time. He loved the country and I think if he could have afforded to do so, he would have moved there to live.

• The photograph shows my dad, Bryan Thorne, on holiday in Malta in 2005.