Damian Green MP, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions since July 2016, has a tough job. His department distributes resources – in the form of pensions and benefits – to around 22 million people and, on account of the criticism it inevitably brings, it is a ministerial role regularly described as a poisoned chalice. Sitting down with Green following his address to the Cambridge University Conservative Association (CUCA), I ask about his experience of the job so far.

“It’s a big and therefore difficult department,” he tells me. “About a third of the population of the country receives something from the Department of Work and Pensions so getting all of those transactions right is, just in an organisational sense, a difficult one. And we have to take decisions about who gets benefits and these may be people who are out of work and may be disabled so each individual decision has to be very carefully weighed. But on the other side, of course, it’s a huge opportunity because you can make a difference to people’s lives.”

Naturally, there are immense and conflicting pressures within the job, particularly in choosing the social groups deserving of the most help. Theresa May has indicated a particular concern with the ‘Just About Managings’ and I am interested to hear if he detected a tension between this commitment and others in regards to pensioners.

“No, I don’t,” he replies. “Theresa has said she wants to help those who are just about managing but that’s not to the exclusion of other groups. In the next few weeks we are going to produce a Green Paper on helping those who are previously described as ‘troubled families’, you know, people who aren’t managing at all, if you like. How can we help children get through that start in life and still make the most of themselves? The point Theresa was making was that there are groups who everyone has always helped, like pensioners. We have far less pensioner poverty than we used to have. Whereas in the 1980s 40 per cent of pensioners lived in poverty we have got that figure down to 14 per cent. Now that’s an enormous social advance that the country, sort of, hasn’t noticed in a weird way and it’s really important, it seems to me, and a really good thing that governments of all colours have achieved over the past 20 years or so. So that’s very good.”

“My wife always says that Theresa wrote better essays than she did”

Green mentions other successes, including an auto-enrollment scheme encouraging millennials to save for their pensions. He is, though, particularly concerned with helping the disabled and those workers over the age of 50 to re-enter the job market. This, he says, is “because, although we have very low levels of unemployment, we have large numbers of people who are, in the jargon, inactive. So they’re not claiming unemployment benefits but nor are they in work and I want to reduce those numbers.”

As our conversation moves to the Prime Minister and her agenda, I am very keen to know more about the relationship between the two politicians, which dates back to their time at Oxford. “I’ve known Theresa for more than 40 years,” he tells me. “She was my wife’s tutorial partner and my wife always says that Theresa wrote better essays than she did. But, you know, she was an entirely normal, though very high-powered, individual as a student, just as she is now. I think, looking back, I’m not surprised [that she became Prime Minister] because she always had that steely determination and, you know, she had expressed an interest in going into politics so we all knew that she wanted to. Again I’m stealing stories from my wife here but she says a lot of people in her first few weeks at Oxford told her that they wanted to be Prime Minister but only one has managed it!”

“Any politician who looks at opinion polls and feels complacent has lost the plot”

We talk more about the initiatives he is championing before the conversation, inevitably, turns to Brexit. I am very interested to hear what Green – a former committee member of Stronger In – had to say to those students disappointed by the referendum result. His response is blunt: “the short, pithy answer is vote. Register to vote and then turn out on election day because if you vote in large numbers then politicians will listen to you and, if you don’t vote, then politicians can afford to ignore you, which is terrible. Older people vote. You can put it quite starkly: there are more older people than younger people these days and older people, two-thirds of them vote whereas 18-24 years olds, one-third of them vote. If you were a politician which of those groups would you listen to most?”

He recommends that those who backed Remain should rally behind the government’s strategy. He is proud to be a “part of a government that is doing its best to make sure that Britain can get as many advantages as we can from this. And in particular to set a tone that is global, outward-looking and optimistic rather than inward-looking and negative. Britain could go either way after the referendum and we’re determined to drive it on the optimistic path, the high road, if you like, and that’s something that actually can unite people who fought on both sides of the referendum. There are clearly still people who are still trying to fight the referendum, who are on both sides of it, and I just think let’s get on with it, the world has moved on, the decision has been taken and the job now is to make the best of it.”

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Despite the Conservative Party’s history of civil war over the European question, Green is cautiously optimistic about the Tories’ future, though far from complacent. He believes that the Conservative Party “always pulls together, and actually we’re in a much better and organised shape than the Labour Party is on the subject of Europe, quite apart from anything else that’s wrong with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.”

Despite the weakness of the opposition, he has, he tells me, “been around in politics long enough to know the inevitable. Once you get overconfident, you get complacent and the electorate can always smell complacency and always kicks back against it, so we are all very, very alive to that. This government has a really difficult task ahead of it with Brexit and a very ambitious domestic agenda. We’re going at it as hard as we can but if we start looking at opinion polls then we’ll go wrong. Given all the things opinion polls have got wrong over the past two years, any politician who looks at opinion polls and feels complacent has lost the plot.”

He laughs, we shake hands and he leaves to catch his train