To many people, a Conservative candidate in Cambridge has the same ring to it as a candidate for the Snowball Party in Hell. Yet the Conservatives came second here in 2010, and held the seat consistently before 1987.

Is that why Chamali Fernando, the current Conservative candidate, seemed so confident despite a nasty cold when we sat down at Trockel, Ulmann & Freunde? “I only entered this race because I believe Cambridge is winnable by the Conservatives,” she says by way of an introduction.

The Lib Dem dominance of Cambridge since 2005 can be broken, she says. “There’s a tactical vote that has been going on in Cambridge for two electoral terms: people have been thinking that they have to vote Lib Dem to keep Labour out.”

A barrister by trade, Fernando left the Lib Dems for the Tories in 2009 after an unsuccessful campaign to become their candidate for Mayor of London; her brother Chandila defected soon afterwards, having run for Lib Dem party president. Their father Sumal ran for the SDP in 1983 and 1987: Fernando recalls being “the babe in arms wheeled out for photographs”.

Why did she quit the Lib Dems? She pauses. “The ability to sleep at night.”

What? “I found there were a lot of things going wrong in the Lib Dems,” she says. “While they talk about democracy, it wasn’t really the grassroots-up structure it claimed to be.”

The Tories, by contrast, have been pioneering open primaries for parliamentary selections in England, though not without problems: the 2010 open primary in Cambridge was not repeated this year, while the South East Cambridgeshire primary last year was marred by allegations of a miscount.

So what appealed about Tory politics? “I’m a Buddhist by philosophy,” she says, gesturing to a little dharmachakra she wears around her neck. “Generally I follow a middle path.” She credits Cameron with having brought the party “to where I stood”, citing JS Mill as a philosophical inspiration.

This centrist liberalism is broadly similar to most candidates in Cambridge, particularly Julian Huppert. How is she intending to differentiate herself from the others?

She starts with the Greens. “Many Green policies rely on the idea of negative growth. We’ve got to be sure that as many people have access to jobs as possible, and if we go down the path of negative growth then all that will happen is unemployment will go up.
“[But] you have to have the ultimate goal in mind of tackling climate change, you need to be brave.” That’s why, she says, she is an adviser to the campaign to establish an International Court for the Environment – to establish, as she puts it, “an organisation with teeth” to enforce agreements like the Kyoto Protocol.

As for the Liberal Democrats and Labour? “In Romsey, someone told me they hadn’t seen a Conservative out there for years... we’re running a very active campaign, and also the demographics of Cambridge mean that the membership of our association has changed… it’s a really diverse community.”

Fernando herself is the only woman running this year, and the only non-white candidate ever to seek election in the Cambridge constituency. “I’ve had to deal with the fact that I’m a woman and I’m brown since the day that I was born,” she says, smiling ruefully.

It’s “interesting”, she says, that the local association was not worried about selecting a non-white person as their candidate. “If I’m elected here in such a vibrant constituency, a global constituency... you are actually telling the world that we embrace the desire of a woman to get into politics.”

Don’t the Conservatives have something of an image problem among BME voters, as Culture Secretary Sajid Javid said recently? She thinks for a moment. “We get caught up in talking about the economy a lot,” she says. “We get sidetracked from articulating Conservative values.

“If you look at the community that [Conservative BME candidates] work in, they often run small businesses, they believe in a strong sense of family, in a strong sense of society, and these are Conservative values.”

In as much as that seems like natural blue ground, that’s all very well, but what do the Tories offer to students? She had been expecting this question, it seems, not least on tuition fees.

“I would still like to see a free education system, but we just cannot balance the books to make that happen,” she says. “We envisage getting the university generation and moving them to a state where there are jobs available [and] people will be in a position to pay back that loan. No business is going to start up in an economic downturn, unless they’re insolvency practitioners.”

What about the leak recently that showed her candidate picture tagged as a “non-target candidate” on the Conservative Party website? She laughs it off. “The Prime Minister was here to say we want Cambridge to come back to us, and we want to win Cambridge in 2015. Not every candidate gets the Prime Minister coming to their constituency!”

The spectre of another prime minister has hovered over her campaign, after Conservative materials carried the quotation often attributed to Winston Churchill: “If you are not a Liberal in your twenties you have no heart, and if you’re not a Conservative by the age of forty then you have no brain.”

Is this unwise in a student constituency? She smiles again. “It’s OK for you to have Liberal thoughts, but it’s OK to change. Not only have I changed, but someone as politically huge as Churchill has changed.”

In the end, she says, “the real issue for the electorate at the next election in 2015 is ‘What do they see as the future for Britain, and what do they see as the future for Cambridge?’ “Cambridge can punch above [its] weight. We’re already doing well; we can go further, to tackle issues such as climate and child poverty, and I believe that Cambridge can lead the charge for a greener, fairer, sustainable society.”

Fernando strikes me as a pragmatist, a realist, though sometimes this can make a politician a bit of a weathervane. I left even less certain about my vote this year than I was when I began. Perhaps that’s healthy.