I’m an ordinary man. I have no skills or experience helping desperate, traumatised people, but when those images of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying lifeless on a Turkish beach appeared, it was a punch to the gut.

I made an online donation, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the awful situation unfolding for refugees, so I started to wonder what more I could do. Conditions in the camp in Calais known as the Jungle were clearly getting worse by the day, and it was relatively close. Could I actually go there? And would I be of any use?

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One of the most pressing needs in the Jungle, as in any refugee camp, is food: there is some provision, but the majority of the 6,000 people there go hungry every single day. I cook meals at home. I can chop onions and wash up. It seemed a good place to start. I posted on Facebook, asking if anyone would like to come. An old friend of mine, Rob Lawson, a chef, said yes. Then Tom Southern, who takes troubled young people on outdoor activities, volunteered.

Then Waleed Ghani, who recently refounded the Whig Party, said he wanted to be involved. I set up a JustGiving page for donations – we wanted to take food and buy other kitchen supplies when we arrived. I booked the ferry and basic accommodation. Via an online forum, I contacted the volunteer-run Ashram kitchen, which feeds 600 people two meals a day – they were desperate for help. We filled Rob’s van with items they urgently needed including 100kg of rice and we set off, with little sense of what awaited us.

The conditions are beyond awful – the image of what we encountered in the Jungle still haunts me. No sanitation, no healthcare, no security, no refuse collection, and no roads – just tracks of stinking mud full of litter and human detritus. Fires break out, as people are forced to light damp piles of wood in their tents to cook and keep warm. But there’s no fire brigade, just social media where urgent calls for fire extinguishers, buckets and sand go out. The weekend before our arrival, fierce winds spread a fire, destroying 250 tents.

The Ashram kitchen is a large tent and a shipping container. There is no running water and only two gas burners. One of those gas burners is constantly required for boiling water, which is brought from a standpipe 100 yards away, through tracks of stinking mud and cesspools. My unfit shoulder muscles are still burning.

At mealtimes, the place is crammed inside, while a long queue forms outside. Plates are frantically washed, dried and reused immediately. There is never enough to feed everyone. Rob broke down when he realised he was running out of hot chai on a freezing day, and could practically identify the very person further along the queue he was going to have to disappoint. And everyone else beyond them.

The only reason thousands of people are not starving and freezing to death only 22 miles from Kent is down to volunteers

At the end of “service”, we clean. The pot wash area consists of pallets covered with mesh over a makeshift drain that flows into the main thoroughfare. Everything must be poured through the mesh, which is emptied and cleaned by whomever has the strongest stomach. We move all the valuable equipment into the lockable shipping container at the end of the day.

There was little time to talk to the refugees, but many volunteer themselves, and this provides an opportunity to chat. We asked one of the refugee volunteers his story. Visibly traumatised and struggling to speak, he told how his sister had been raped and killed in front of him. After they killed her, they raped her again. It felt cruel to have him continue, so we didn’t. We never asked anyone again.

The volunteers are a mixed bunch – a middle-aged Home Counties gent in tweeds and red trousers works alongside a dreadlocked hippy. One woman, Amy, a chef from London, booked a week off work and cycled there because she couldn’t bear to do nothing. We thought we were imagining we saw Downton Abbey butler Carson washing up, but it really was actor Jim Carter who is setting up his own charity, Wand Aid. All this was uplifting. As was the beautiful artwork we saw painted by the refugees on corrugated iron – a soul-gladdening juxtaposition to the ugliness of the £15m fence erected by the British government. What you could do with £15m in the Jungle.

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I can’t make sense of the situation in Calais – an obscene level of suffering on our doorstep, and in one of the world’s most prosperous countries, and yet no one accepts responsibility. The UN is not in the Jungle and so therefore neither are the main aid agencies. And yet conditions fall short of basic UN humanitarian standards. The French and the British governments each claim it is not their problem, and so refuse to provide the most basic infrastructure and safe, legal means for refugees to seek asylum in the UK. It is a grotesque abdication of responsibility.

As Waleed said: “I’m a patriot – I served in the army – but this place makes me embarrassed to be British. The UK is supposed to be a force for good in the world and defend human rights, but the best we can do when there’s a humanitarian crisis just 22 miles from our border is just to put up a bigger fence and more barbed wire?”

What volunteers can provide falls well short, but they do it because no one else is doing it.

The only reason thousands of people are not starving and freezing to death only 22 miles from Kent is because of volunteers – decent, ordinary volunteers who cannot stand by and let people suffer – people not represented by this government. And so, for this reason, we will also be returning to the Jungle next year. I can’t stay away.