“I think there’s a building on stilts somewhere over there,” Margaret Mountford waves in the direction of the Raised Faculty as she leaves the Sidgwick Site. “I walked up here today and thought, is this the Sidgwick Site? I used to come to lectures here every day for the first year!”

The decision to return to Cambridge to study Classics was “less ephemeral than a whim” for Mountford. “I’d always liked to visit classical sites when I was on holiday, I’d drag my friends round all these ruins. I thought I’d really like to study that and know more about it.” Almost two decades after beginning her second undergraduate degree, she’s now received her PhD, and has spent the past hour giving a lecture on Papyrology in association with the Classics Society. She hates public speaking, she tells me, but nevertheless sits down across the desk with the air of one who knows her talk has been well received. She answers my questions deftly, with an occasional wry smile and a no-nonsense glance.

Mountford has fond recollections of Cambridge, and especially of her old college. “I always think I owe my career, really, to Girton,” she says, her face lighting up. “In the summer it was lovely, you could get away, you didn’t have those big busloads of people. Oh, and there’s far more of that than there used to be, far more tourists.”

All the selfies, I muse.

“Well, we didn’t have selfies,” she returns, somewhat proudly. “The odd person had a camera, but there wasn’t all this awful in-your-face stuff all the time.”

Cambridge in the early 1970s was a university undergoing major changes. During Mountford’s tenure at Girton, Churchill, Clare and King’s became the first co-educative colleges; just three years before her arrival, the Cambridge Union Society elected its first ever female president. Yet Mountford looks slightly surprised at the suggestion that there might have been a related atmosphere at the university at the time. “You were just used to them being women’s colleges and men’s colleges. In Law lectures there might have been 200 men and 15 women. It was simply the way it was... there didn’t seem anything strange about it.” Similarly, she bats aside my question about sexism in the legal profession. “I think [Charlotte Proudman] is absolutely ridiculous. You put a nice photograph up, and you can’t even take a compliment, you know.

“If somebody offers me a seat on the tube, I don’t start beating them around the head and saying, ‘I CAN STAND JUST AS WELL AS YOU CAN’, do I? I say, ‘thank you very much’.”

I tentatively observe that she must be bored of fielding questions about her stint on The Apprentice. “I am,” she says sharply, and there is a hint of irritation in her laugh. As a business lawyer who came late to the TV industry, the celebrity associated with her appearance on the show, though not unexpected, was certainly unwelcome. “It used to annoy me, but now I’ve stopped letting it annoy me, because it’s my fault.” She shudders. “When people grab hold of my arm – I can’t bear that!”

Seven years on, Mountford seems genuinely bemused by the fact that The Apprentice is still the first thing on people’s minds when they see her; she’s keen to emphasise that more years have now elapsed since she left the show than she spent on it. Still, it’s a topic that she seems unable to avoid: it crops up again as she tells me about her struggle to complete a part-time degree and a Master’s alongside. “The hours were so horrendous.

“If the contestants have to be somewhere at eight, we’re going to be there at eight. They don’t come and film us getting up, that’s the difference!”

Of course, a certain former star of The Apprentice’s sister show in the US is now running for President. “I have never met the man, and I’ve never had any involvement with his businesses, nor would I want to,” she says firmly, but she won’t be drawn on the subject. “I’m delighted he didn’t win the first caucus.” She is less reticent, however, with her views on British politics. Business is under-represented in Parliament, she tells me, because pretty much everything is under-represented in Parliament. But she seems to have more pity than contempt for modern politicians. “You’re in a sort of goldfish bowl and you must wonder, am I actually doing anything?

“Parliament has changed. We used to have great orators – you listen to somebody like Enoch Powell, a wonderful speaker. Nowadays, the only time anybody does a decent speech tends to be at their resignation. Debates don’t sway people, they’ve always made up their minds before they go in.”

Did she ever consider a career in politics? “No,” she says, immediately. “I would have hated it.”

So what are her plans for the future? Suddenly melodramatic, Mountford puts her head in her hands. “I have no time to do anything!” She’s active in the Hellenic Society and chair of the judges for this year’s Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction, a role that has seen her read 170 novels since September. The goal, she tells me, is to pursue her Classical interests. “I don’t have a lot of time for papyrology, but I’d like to have more!”