Craig Murray's tribute to Sir Clement Freud

Craig Murray remembers his predecessor as rector of Dundee University:

I was more than once the beneficiary of Freud's largesse as he took groups of apparently random students out for boozy meals. For the student charities' campaign he produced The Rector's Cookbook, a collection of recipes that could be cooked in one pan on a single gas ring - in those days a not unusual sole cooking facility for a Dundee student.

He did a promotional piece for STV in a student flat in Springfield, equipped with a fold-away gas ring that swung out from the wall. Halfway through his cooking demonstration the cooking ring collapsed, the pan clashed to the floor, spraying everyone with chilli, and a jet of yellow flame shot across the room, setting fire to the bedclothes.

Freud turned to the camera and said, in the slowest and most deadpan voice imaginable as the room blazed around him: "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the perfect demonstration of the conditions which students have beed reduced to under the Labour government."