Jacqui Smith was regarded by fellow students as a serious, hard-working girl from an unfashionable part of the country and as far from a dope fiend as any of them could be.

Her two passions were rowing and left-wing politics, neither of them associated with the louche, decadent end of Oxford University life in the early 1980s.

Her main achievement was to become president of the Junior Common Room at Hertford College, an institution then notable for encouraging students from state schools.

“The odd spliff turned up at a working-class lager party at Hertford,” a former contemporary said. “She might have had a smoke of it as it was passed round. You can’t imagine her having more than three puffs, probably in circumstances where it would have been more socially embarrassing to say no. You are on to a very, very cold scent. I would be surprised if anybody fingered her as a drug taker.”

Jacqui Smith was brought up in the Midlands town of Malvern. Her father was a headteacher and her mother an economics teacher. She attended comprehensive school.

The future Home Secretary studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics from 1981 to 1984 and was awarded a 2:1 degree. She went to Oxford in the same wild era as Hugh Grant, Earl Spencer, Darius Guppy and Boris Johnson but was rather more mild-mannered than the better-heeled students.

A previous profile of her university days for The Mail on Sunday uncovered a photograph of her taking part in a boisterous drinking game but nothing more scandalous. At a nightwear party, she played “bunnies”, where students must down a drink if they fail to make rabbit ears with their hands when pointed at. While some of the girls would wear scanty dressing gowns, the sensible Miss Smith insisted on covering up with pyjamas.

A friend from Hertford recalled: “She was into boats big-time.” Jacqui Smith made the First VIII of the rowing club at Hertford College and her social scene revolved heavily around the sport.

But a student from another college, who knew her, said: “Hertford was not a great rowing college. Earnest but not terribly serious.”

Miss Smith also threw herself into the Labour Club and was the party’s unsuccessful candidate for the students’ union presidency in 1984. She came second to James Dickinson, a candidate for the then modish Social Democratic Party.

“Posh people had proper drugs and voted SDP. Labour and Tories drank lager and had the odd spliff,” a contemporary political activist said. “She was an all-round college girl. That’s why she lost the presidency because she didn’t have any profile outside her own set. She relied on the Labour label to win. Hertford College and the Labour Club. That’s dull and duller.

“Hertford was one of the least druggy colleges. [Drugs] was the territory of the posher, more fey places like Magdalen and New College. If those were Manchester United, Hertford was Aston Villa on a bad weekend.

“She was very much a college creature, not particularly on the general university scene. Rather earnest, like she is now. Certainly not remotely trendy. The complete polar opposite of David Cameron temperamentally.

“If she says she did cannabis two or three times at university, that’s almost certainly true. There wasn’t much going on at that time in her sort of circle at Hertford. It was noble but slightly dull, mostly girls.

“Cannabis was the limit for a working-class girl. There was the odd West Indian place in Oxford where you could buy it. Harder, more wacky stuff was the realm of the super-rich. Posher people snorted coke. They could afford it and knew where to find it.”

Jacqui Smith went on to Worcester College of Higher Education and became a teacher while remaining a Labour activist in the city until she was elected MP in 1997. A long-standing friend said that she had cut out cannabis long before. “It’s not something that went on at teacher training college,” he said.

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