While the role that Boris Johnson’s new adviser Dominic Cummings played in the Vote Leave campaign is well-established, his links to another disruptive force in British public life are less well known.

Klute nightclub in Durham, with its sticky floors, strong drinks and unapologetically cheesy music, boasts of having been a favourite of the city’s students for more than 40 years.

The 400-capacity club was apparently awarded the title of second worst nightclub in Europe by FHM magazine, before the venue in first place burned down, leaving Klute to take the top spot by default.

The club was owned by Cummings’ uncle Phil and in his youth the political adviser reportedly helped him to run it. While the business was bought by Tokyo Industries in 2013, Cummings is still listed as the only director of a dormant company called Klute Limited.

The announcement on Wednesday that Cummings – the former head of the Vote Leave campaign – would be a senior adviser to Boris Johnson was seen as hugely controversial. The former aide to Michael Gove as education secretary was found in contempt of parliament in March for failing to appear before MPs investigating the proliferation of false news stories during the EU referendum campaign.

Cummings, the son of an oil rig project manager and a special needs teacher, was born in Durham in 1971. He attended the fee-paying Durham school, before going on to study at the University of Oxford.

In January, the Sunday Express reported that Cummings had worked as a doorman at Klute at weekends. “He might not have looked like a doorman,” a former colleague told the paper. “But he had a way with him that suggested it wasn’t worth taking him on.”

One fellow Eurosceptic campaigner told the Guardian about a particularly drunken night there with Cummings in 2005. “We went there after dinner and we were completely battered by the time we got to Klute. It’s a long time ago and I was very drunk, but I’m pretty sure we were taken into some sort of VIP area,” he said.

“Everyone had been going on at me beforehand about how terrible it was. It was infamously bad, and even Dom was making jokes about it, but I got there and thought: ‘This is quite nice’.”

He remembers drinking a range of cocktails including “cheeky vimtos” – usually made from port and the alcopop WKD Blue. “People were dressed up for a good night out in the way people in London don’t really,” he said. “It was just a very normal, fun night out.”

In a comment thread on the Student Room website from 2009, one student described Klute as “a cheese-infested hellhole”. Another from 2005 described it as “sweaty, a bit gross, moody bouncers”, adding more cheerfully: “double and mixer £2”.

These days the club seems to have embraced its down-at-heel image, adopting the tagline: “Wipe your feet on the way out.”

After visiting the club in 2014, the Vice journalist Jonny Chadwick concluded that it was “the best example of the worst kind of club night”.

“This sweatbox of unpleasant humans, terrible music and unbearable odours probably deserves its place at the top of the podium,” he said.