Maurice Cowling hid his kindliness beneath a gruff exterior. His first question when he interviewed me for admission to Peterhouse could have been interpreted as hostile: 'Just how Italian are you, Mr Portillo?' Today I could probably sue for ethnic harassment.

His teaching method would also nowadays be judged politically incorrect. When undergraduates attended his supervisions in pairs, one would be invited to read his essay aloud. After a sentence or two at most, Maurice's face would contort with pain. 'Stop! Stop!' he would cry. 'Read that again'. When the undergraduate stammered out the offending phrase once more, Maurice would sigh, 'Oh God, I thought so'. The remaining pages of the essay would go unread.

At an early supervision Maurice told me that I wrote with a pickaxe and asked me whether I had learned Spanish or English first. At least by then he had correctly identified my father's nationality.

Surprisingly his method of teaching worked. Students learned how to write and to think better.

For me, as for many undergraduates, Cowling was a hero. After Maurice’s death Charles Moore wrote that because of his slight squint and astonishingly arched eyebrows Cowling had an air of amused wickedness. Of course undergraduates loved it. We found his cynicism both shocking and exhilarating. I recall excitedly telling Maurice a story about people who were then my political heroes, Harold Macmillan and President John Kennedy. 'Kennedy was a liberal shit' was his deflating reply.

He was famously fond of plotting. He loved intrigues amongst the Fellows at Peterhouse, sometimes campaigning for a candidate to become Master, sometimes organising dissent against one who had been elected Master, enjoying it especially when that was one and the same person. He could laugh heartily at the discomfiture of his enemies, with that sheepish look on his face and his grey head shaking with mirth. But he also had a strong sense of justice, and many will remember how he fought indignantly for a fellow-member of the Governing Body who was treated shabbily.

Maurice's world was a world of academic rigour: as writer and lecturer he was a hard-hitter, as teacher a hard task-master. But those of us who were his pupils also saw a softer side: we miss him in part because he bothered about us then, and he continued to bother about us afterwards. Shortly after I had left Cambridge I found myself in a dead-end job and sought his career advice. He was very helpful. 'It's a pity that you are not interested in politics', he said: 'otherwise I could recommend you to the Conservative Party’s Research Department'.

That demonstrates that he did not, as some have assumed, indoctrinate his students with his political views nor, as far as I know, did he send out into the world a phalanx of Cowlingite Tories. Rather, I believe he sent forth a bunch of sceptics. After encountering Maurice it was hard to accept anything or anyone at face value.

The mid-1970s witnessed an exciting revival in Conservative fortunes and Maurice was a part of it. Although he was no great supporter of Margaret Thatcher his writing helped to provide her with intellectual underpinning that boosted her self-confidence, which was in any case not especially fragile.

In Maurice’s book The Impact of Labour, which came out in 1975, he described how in 1920 the Tory Party reacted to the emergence of Labour as its principal opponent. That moment offered Conservative politicians unusual room for manoeuvre. They could define new political landmarks in the unfamiliar political terrain. The book was prophetic because the collapse of the Callaghan government at the end of the 1970s provided Margaret Thatcher with similar scope.

In his introduction to The Impact of Labour Maurice defined the character of high politics. What counted was not Parliament or public opinion but the way that the few politicians who mattered, those of rank and weight, reacted to each other. Their political rhetoric was intended to supply the new landmarks, and their political manoeuvre was designed to ensure that the right people provided those landmarks. In typical Maurice prose he observed that in high politics the players were trying not merely to say what the electors wanted to hear, but to make electors want them to say what they wanted to say in the first place.

Maurice had little direct experience of politics. He once stood as the Tory candidate for Bassetlaw and told me he had enjoyed it as much as having fifty teeth out. But he was wonderfully insightful about politics and the more I have experienced that world the more I have marvelled at his extraordinary intuition.

At the end of my undergraduate days I climbed the stairs of Fen Court at Peterhouse towards the set of rooms where Maurice worked amidst a chaos of books, dirty crockery, pots of cold coffee and empty whisky bottles. I went to kneel at the feet of the oracle and to receive his benediction before stepping from the cloister of Cambridge into the big bad world. I will never forget his valedictory words. They were: 'Bugger off'.

The last time I told that story it was also part of a eulogy. But Maurice was present. Characteristically he giggled with mock embarrassment and repeatedly muttered: 'Oh God' and 'Stop! Stop!'

I wish that he were with us today to puncture any sentimentality.

Addresses were also given that day by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne and Professor Michael Bentley