Matthew Elliott (far right) with Vote Leave battle bus TWITTER

“It’s so nice to be talking to you guys.” Matthew Elliott, Chief Executive of Vote Leave, is addressing the Cambridge University Conservative Association (CUCA). “I was at a conference before this… there was so much intellectual dishonesty going on!”.

If anyone needed reminding, Cambridge was one of the strongest Remain constituencies, with 73.8 per cent voting to stay within the EU. Yet tonight, though there are a few of the concerned or curious academic types in attendance, the audience seem to be mostly Leave voters. There is an odd atmosphere – palpable satisfaction with just a hint of siege mentality – and one attendee’s observation that “it’s so hard to be a Brexiteer in Cambridge” draws murmurs of assent from the overwhelmingly male audience.

For weeks in advance of the referendum, Elliott had been loudly predicting a Leave victory. Nevertheless, the night of the referendum itself, he says, was “an amazing night ... we were actually all quite downbeat in a way, we were sort of wondering what was going to happen.”

Yet he was surprised at the rapidity and smoothness of the Conservative response to the result. He quickly affirms that he did not support Andrea Leadsom’s bid for the leadership, but suggests he would have liked to have seen Boris Johnson as prime minister.

“When Boris announced [his leadership bid] in The Sunday Times…I genuinely supported that. I bought into the idea that you needed to have a ‘Leave’ prime minister.”

But all that disintegrated, he tells me, with Gove’s leadership bid – and the phrase “stabbed in the back” escapes his mouth before I can say it. “I was so surprised, because they had worked extremely closely together on the campaign and I never saw any ill-will between them. For me, it must be said, the immediate aftermath of the campaign was very sad.”

Elliott is incredibly well-versed in the argument he makes, but delivers it with the peculiar detachedness of one used to being harangued at dinner tables. He is optimistic about Theresa May’s premiership: “May has impressed people. She hasn’t been kowtowing and tugging her forelock to international leaders”.

Perhaps predictably, he is keen to present May’s coy preference for the Remain camp as a political advantage at the negotiations table. “She can say to other member states, hand on heart, ‘I was remain but you’ve got to listen to the people now ... Brexit means Brexit’”.

Elliott walks the fine line between a condemnation of Farage and UKIP on the one hand, and of UKIP’s voting bloc on the other. “We made an explicit commitment to be distant from UKIP,” he tells me firmly. “We didn’t like the tactics they had used in the past, we wanted to have a broad-base campaign with sensible people from business, academics, etc. There’s no love lost between myself and Nigel Farage.”

It’s a distinction which seems to preoccupy him; he later reminds me that “we denounced the ‘breaking point’ poster in quite vocal terms, so we don’t feel any responsibility for that.” Yet twice in under 15 minutes he dodges the issue of whether Vote Leave owes at least some of their success to anti-EU prejudices propagated by UKIP.

If he disowns Farage, he is reluctant to disown Leave voters. “I think there’s a clear distinction between Nigel Farage and the UKIP leadership, and the UKIP activists. Lots of UKIP activists, who are good people and passionate people, took part in Vote Leave events.”

But he knows Farage? He smiles wryly. “We don’t talk. Basically, he won’t talk to me, because [we] stopped him from heading up the official Vote Leave campaign. The funny thing is, and I don’t think he accepts this, but he wouldn’t have won the campaign.”

Now, Elliott is just as unequivocal in condemning Farage for his endorsement of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States. But he is relaxed when I ask him if he’s irritated by Trump’s appropriation of Brexit.

“I think Trump will be as successful as Nigel Farage would have been on his own, had he been running the [Vote Leave] campaign – i.e., he’s going to lose.”

I cannot help but remind him that Cambridge had one of the highest remain votes in the UK. “After Lambeth,” he interrupts with a smile, “where I live.” Can he, I ask, understand why the vote to leave has upset a great many people – especially international students – on a personal level?

“I can understand it,” he says, after a long pause. “I have been in situations as a Eurosceptic where I was in the minority position, and felt that the EU was imposing laws on my life and curtailing my freedoms, so I can understand how frustrating it can be when you feel that the political system is against you.”

“We’re not stepping out of Europe and pulling up a drawbridge. We’re stepping out of Europe and into the world.”