Patrick O’Flynn MEP is a hard man to pin down. For weeks, I had been desperately trying to find a spot in his schedule to interview him for Varsity, but between his commitments in the European Parliament and as Economic Spokesman for UKIP, finding time to sit down with him was not easy.

Eventually I got the call. He could only squeeze in time for a phone interview, so I dusted off my battery of questions.

I asked him about UKIP’s chances in Cambridge. Across polls and across the local and European elections, UKIP tends to poll at around three per cent, and if anything the general election could be even worse for the party. This is especially true of students:  UKIP received two per cent in Varsity’s survey. What’s his angle?

“My ambition was to put UKIP on the map in Cambridge,” says O’Flynn. “I particularly wanted to give a democratic outlet to a fairly significant proportion of the electorate in Cambridge who I think are ignored and overlooked, who tend to be the more long-standing Cambridge residents without links to the university.

“I want to offer something different on the ballot paper [to] the soft-left, liberal-left, middle-class sensibility,” he says.

The Cambridge field is very liberal this time around: besides Julian Huppert himself, both Rupert Read (Green) and Chamali Fernando (Conservative) are former Liberal Democrats.

This is why, he said at at a UKIP public meeting on Friday 17th April, he doesn’t attend very many hustings, telling the room that there are normally “the same 250 liberal middle-class do-gooders” in the audience each time.

Asked about this, he audibly sighs. “I could spend my entire time going from hall to hall speaking to between 50 and 200 people at a time and there would be very few UKIP voters, or even UKIP considerers, among them, because it does tend to be very middle-class people who are already connected into the political process and who find the choices already on offer to be very much to their taste.

“I’ve instead spent my time doing action days in target wards, several of which are not even known to the vast majority of the student body.”

His mentions of the students so far have been slightly disparaging. It’s hard to blame him. Young Independence, UKIP’s youth wing, don’t even have a presence at the university.

Yet UKIP’s policies on tuition fees are not exactly hard-right: to the contrary, their manifesto pledges to abolish tuition fees for STEM subjects and medicine.

“When Tony Blair brought in top-up fees and initially scrapped maintenance grants, I was against both moves. I was a political journalist on the Daily Express at the time, and we had a campaign against top-up fees.

“Fundamentally, I don’t believe in fees for home students,” he continues.  “At this election, we’ve managed to come up with a fully-costed scheme to exempt the STEM subjects from tuition fees for home students.”

Of course, the European Union forms part of UKIP’s education policy. “Part of that is being able to charge non-British EU students the full-rated international fee. I would like us to be in a position at the next general election to be able to say that we will abolish tuition fees altogether.”

So how does UKIP intend to square education policy with its hardline approach on immigration? International students provide an important source of cashflow to British universities.

To my surprise, O’Flynn agrees with me. “We will count students separately in the immigration figures. I would agree that international students coming to study at reputable universities – not just the bogus colleges that have sprung up in recent years – that flow of international students is a good thing. It generates money for higher education, and the people who come are generally of high ability. There’s no intention to knacker the flow of international students.

“If we are to have fees, my preferred financing model would be to give students the choice of paying back, say, two per cent of future earnings for a given number of years, because that would give the universities and the colleges an incentive to produce people who are going off to be a big success.”

Lastly, I touch on one of the most visible concerns in Cambridge: transport. UKIP’s national policy is, bluntly, fairly pro-car. They promise to “scrap HS2”, stop tolls on public roads and review the use of speed cameras, and ran in the 2014 European election on a platform of slashing fuel duty. Won’t this make congestion in Cambridge worse?

“One advantage is that it’s a compact city so moving around doesn’t involve great distances, particularly for the student body,” he says, bridling a little at the suggestion.

“I would like to have lots and lots of relatively small-scale improvements, rather than some kind of... Cambridge underground,” he says, referring to some of the more outlandish policies mooted for the City Deal in January. “I would prefer looking at, for example, the phasing of traffic lights. There are some that just don’t work: I’m thinking of Castle Hill down to Northampton Street.”

I decide to finish on a less serious question. Patrick O’Flynn went to King’s, like his Labour opponent Daniel Zeichner. Bins outside King’s last week bore stickers reading ‘LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR: SKIP UKIP’.

O’Flynn laughs raspily down the phone. “I was an exact contemporary and a big mate of David Laws at King’s, so probably until my emergence David was about the most shocking thing that had ever happened to King’s politics. I may have snatched that title!”

Indeed he has. O’Flynn is a far cry from the UKIP stereotype, charming and thoughtful, but unless something radical happens, he hasn’t got a hope in Cambridge.

But his true goals are elsewhere. With Nigel Farage promising to step down as UKIP leader if he loses in South Thanet, we may be hearing from Patrick O’Flynn again, and sooner than we might expect.