When I sat down to interview Rupert Read at the Anchor, I had been expecting his rather haggard expression. It’s been a difficult few weeks for him, fighting for his political life amid allegations of transphobia and ableism on Twitter. What I wasn’t expecting were the two Green minders that were flanking him as I walked in.

A tight leash? I ask him for his narrative, and he sighs. “It wouldn’t be a lie to say it’s been the toughest time I’ve had in my political life,” he says.

The day I spoke to him, he had published a piece on the Independent’s website, apologising for his comments after talking to trans activists.

“Every cloud has a silver lining; at least this one does,” he tells me. “The meetings, for example, that I’ve had in the last few days with Green trans people: very enlightening, and wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

The Green Party has hitherto been heavily reliant on the votes of young activists. The backlash was so severe that Natalie Bennett, the leader of the Green Party in England and Wales, apologised for his comments soon after the news broke. Could the scandal have damaged the Cambridge campaign?

“I think that some people got very understandably upset by what they were hearing.” But, he adds, “people are mostly talking about other things.”

“So we’ll see. I mean, the only thing I can take responsibility for really is what I’ve done and what we’ve done. I think in difficult circumstances, the Green Party’s pulled well together.”

Read’s background is academic: he is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Many of the quotations about which activists were the most vitriolic were taken from a number of long-form pieces posted to the Talking Philosophy blog. Is that background a problem in the age of social media?

“Yeah, possibly. The way it should be, it seems to me, is that philosophy should be the basis of politics... it can go wrong, especially when people look at things in a superficial way and quote things out of context.” He calls the original Independent and Pink News articles about his comments (which have since been updated) “utterly misleading.”

“It was appalling journalism... it’s clear that the reasons why people thought that I was a transphobe, they just don’t hold up.

“It was quite a distressing experience, in that way, to be so badly misunderstood. But I also take responsibility for the fact that probably it’s difficult to go from philosophy to politics sometimes, and it probably wasn’t... very sensible... at all to get into an argument on Twitter about it.”

Was there any partisan motivation behind the attacks? “I can’t speak to that, I don’t know,” he says carefully.

“It’s possible that some people in other parties are jealous of how good [Green LGBT policies] are, and if so they’re always welcome to join the Green surge.” Or steal the policies? “We welcome recycling of our policies,” he says, smiling wryly.

It is on those policies that the election will be decided. Read is the national transport spokesman: I ask him about this, given the recent speculation about the future of public transport in Cambridge.

Immediately he perks up, and refers me to the Transport Green Book for Cambridge, a detailed, 33-page policy document he co-authored.

“It’s the linchpin of our election campaign... it’s a fundamental issue for Britain and for the modern world, but it’s an issue that opinion polls consistently show... concerns people in Cambridge far more than any other issue and much more than it concerns people in ostensibly similar places.”

He reels off a list of plans at both the local and national level: improving cycling facilities, re-regulating buses, re-nationalising the railway network and reopening old train lines. Then the most radical proposal: “It’s time for Cambridge to get serious about looking at something like a congestion charge.”

The problem is, of course, putting this into practice. Although Cambridge was a comparatively good result for the Greens nationally at the last election (7.6 per cent), it still pales in comparison to the other parties. How feasible is it that he’ll be elected?

“Right now we’ve got a long way to go”, he says. “We’re hoping that the Green surge nationally is going to continue, that our polling numbers [and] membership numbers are going to carry on going up. What we’re saying to people is: ‘Come on, now’s the time to vote for what you believe in.’”

“Tactical voting is so over,” he adds. “People voted tactically at the last election and all it got them was David Cameron in Downing Street. If people vote for what they believe in, in Cambridge, then we can win. We can win... There’s an unprecedented possibility here.” However, he says, even if he does lose, “I’m very hopeful that we will have done something positive to the politics of Cambridge and of this country and that we will be building for the longer term... Part of what you do in politics, and you never know how successful it’s going to be, is you change the agenda, you change people’s sense of what’s possible.”

Is the increased attention for the Greens a worry? Some of their policies have earned derision over recent weeks.

“Well, look, UKIP don’t have any policies. We have policies. When you have policies, that’s something for people to shoot at.” Read is optimistic, though: he cites the Votes for Policies website, where at time of writing the Green Party leads by a significant margin in terms of policy approval among half a million respondents.

Even on policies like the basic income, over which Natalie Bennett recently clashed with Andrew Neil on the BBC’s Sunday Politics programme, Read is sanguine. “It’s not the kind of policy we’d be bringing in on May 8th.

“The thing that we’d be pushing for in the short term is the living wage, make the minimum wage into a living wage, and try to, if you will, raise Labour’s game on that.”

However, the Greens’ record in government has been tested by the precedent in Brighton, where the Green administration on the council has clashed with the Green MP, Caroline Lucas, over cuts brought in to local services. This raises Read’s hackles.

“A really important thing to remember about [Brighton] is that it’s a minority administration... [the Greens] wanted to increase council tax to stop services being cut. Labour and the Tories stopped that from happening.

“It’s an absolute outrage and a scandal that Labour then turns around and says”—and here, he waves his hands around and puts on a high-pitched, mocking voice—“Ooh, you’re cutting services.”

I press him on this: is discipline an inherent problem for the Greens? “The Green Party does things in a somewhat different way to other parties, and this can sometimes cause problems,” he admits.

“The key difference is that we don’t whip. We rely on people to work together out of solidarity and in good conscience. In my experience as a former councillor that works incredibly well, but it can sometimes go wrong.”

Cambridge is likely to be a close-run seat. “What this all boils down to is that if our vote continues to increase, if the Green surge in membership, in activism, in money, in the polls goes on... it could become possible to win Cambridge on a historically low percentage of the vote. The winner in this seat might have as little as 28, 27, 26, maybe even 25 per cent of the vote.”

“Now is that going to happen? Who the hell knows... [but] to make it possible that that could happen, start voting for what you believe in... A hell of a lot of people in Cambridge want to vote Green. Do it.”

Rupert Read faces an uphill battle in the wake of the last few weeks, and he is starting from a position of electoral disadvantage.

Perhaps he’s right, though: the Greens have never done this well in the national polls, and if anywhere is a good shot for the Green Party, it’s Cambridge. The only people who will make the decision are the students and residents of Cambridge – and we won’t know their decision until election day. Only Cambridge knows, and Cambridge isn’t yet saying.