It always makes an interviewer’s life easier when his subject fits neatly into the popular caricature; when three do so at once, you feel positively spoiled. Together for the first time, the three candidates for the Edinburgh University rectorship live up famously to expectations: George Galloway, the vehement, vaguely feline political campaigner; Iain MacWhirter, the softly spoken gentleman-journalist; and George Foulkes, the jovial Falstaff of the House of Lords – who, as the debate gets started around a table at Peter’s Yard, is nowhere to be seen.

Expertly timing his entrance to interrupt MacWhirter’s opening lament on the bleak future facing this generation of graduates, Foulkes is the first man I’ve seen manage to look effervescently sheepish. “Sorry to keep you; the people organising my campaign are determined I’m going to lose!” he announces. Unflustered, MacWhirter resumes his gloomy tidings. “A lot of students are going to leave university finding they’ve acquired quite formidable overdrafts, which are not going to be rolled over as easily as was the case in the past – which is why we’ve been highlighting the campaign for the £7,000 guarantee...”

Foulkes wastes no time getting stuck in. “He pinched it from us!” he declares of the Sunday Herald columnist’s idea for a minimum income guarantee. MacWhirter looks amused. “When did you announce it?” he asks.

“Well, it’s been adopted by the Labour party for policy for the next...”

“When was it announced?”

“Well it has been adopted...we haven’t announced it yet...”

“Oh – you haven’t announced it yet?”

Foulkes is gleefully exasperated – if he must lose this opening argument, he’s damn well going to have fun doing it. “He’s too used to being on television interviewing people!” he tells me, with a conspiratorial smirk. Maybe so – but it’s round one MacWhirter, I fear.

Not wishing to be left out of the early tussle, Galloway takes aim at Foulkes’s voting record. “The reason we’re in this problem is because Lord Foulkes voted for the very measures which have led students into the indebtedness that they have. He’s a New Labour, Tony Blair yes-man; I was a no-man, and I was right and he was wrong,” Galloway concludes primly. I’m not sure this “no-man” expression will catch on—it sounds a little too close to “nonentity”—but at least the battle lines have been drawn.

Things heat up further when I broach the treacherous subject of top-up fees – an innovation supported by Foulkes at its inception. Without explicitly calling the move a mistake, he makes what sounds almost like an apology: “At the time it was better than what we had we had previously; it seemed to be an advance. But it hasn’t proved successful, and it’s useful to admit that.”

Galloway smells blood. “Can I say, then, that everything that George has now discovered about top-up fees, we pointed out at the time when we opposed them. How many hundreds of thousands of students have been condemned to penury by a decision which George made, which he now acknowledges was wrong?”

“Slogans, slogans, slogans,” groans Foulkes, wearily. Galloway is apparently basing his entire campaign on his antagonism towards the Labour peer – after all, according to his Daily Record column, only the two of them are really in with a chance. Not that MacWhirter seems bothered by Galloway’s apparent refusal to acknowledge him – as Iain Duncan Smith once famously said, “do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man.” (Do I imagine the faint resemblance?) In any case, MacWhirter seems happy to sit quietly and let the other two have their fun, before getting stuck in to the thrills of the debate over substandard feedback.

“I think we’ve got to be careful not to set students against staff here, because the teaching at Edinburgh is generally of the highest standard,” says MacWhirter. “But some academics see teaching as something that gets in the way. We have to find a way in which teaching can be rewarded, so it can be built into the promotion prospects of academics.” MacWhirter’s clearly done enough market research to identify the foremost student gripe – even if it’s not entirely clear how his solution is to be executed.

Galloway’s answer is similarly crowd-pleasing, as he calls for a relaxation of the emphasis on research. “The primary role is teaching,” he asserts, “and I think that Edinburgh University is out of kilter on this – there’s too much research and not enough teaching, and I’m for a shift in that balance.”

Ever the populist, Galloway echoes sentiments that are muttered by students across UoE campuses – but Foulkes is not impressed. “The two shouldn’t be seen in competition,” he insists. “Good research can be used to help teaching.” Foulkes’s refusal to prostrate himself before student opinion is refreshing; still more refreshing is the sudden realisation that the candidates are talking about something other than each other.

Keen to take advantage of this rare moment of calm, I bring up the recent fighting in Gaza – a territory whose people's plight led the University and College Union to look into a blanket boycott of Israeli academics, in 2007. Would the candidates support such a move?

“I supported the UCU's stand on it,” says Galloway. “I support the same approach being taken to Israel as we took to apartheid South Africa.”

Foulkes, who spent time in Palestine as a development minister, disagrees. “There are people in Israeli universities who are vehemently against what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza,” he tells Galloway. “We should not be isolating Israeli academics who are strongly against the war as you are.”

This doesn't wash with MacWhirter, who echoes Galloway's support for a boycott. “I think you have to make moral choices, and this is a very clear one,” he says. Well, not according to the UCU itself, which was forced to admit publicly that its proposed boycott “would be unlawful and cannot be implemented.” In his eagerness to follow what he believes to be the student line, it seems MacWhirter has forgotten the first law of journalism: don't forget to check the facts.

Galloway's responsibilities to his London constituency have provoked concerns that he would be unable to serve Edinburgh as a “hands-on” rector – a suggestion that he dismisses, inevitably, by reference to his former Labour colleague. “Lord Foulkes’s job’s not based in Scotland,” he jibes.

“No, no, my job is based in Scotland,” blusters Foulkes, who seems to have been taken off guard. Galloway goes in for the kill. “I’ve got your expenses claim!” he triumphantly tells his rival. “You spend a lot of time in Westminster according to your expenses claim.”

“Well, more than you,” retorts Foulkes. “You’re never there, George!”

“I’m there every day,” Galloway proudly replies.

As for me, I’m confused: wasn’t this a tussle over which spends the least time at Westminster? In any case, the message is clear: if you think I’m bad, you should see the other fellow.

MacWhirter looks a little smug as he strokes his non-political credentials. “I don’t think the skills of being a politician, however elevated, are necessarily the appropriate skills for being a rector,” he says. “And I’ve found that there’s a lot of suspicion of politicians among students.”

Foulkes isn’t letting him get away with that. “Maybe part of the reason they’re cynical about politicians is some of the things that Iain has written over the last few years or decades,” he snipes.

For all their recognition of our disillusionment with mainstream politicians, the candidates are steadfast in their defence of students against charges of apathy. “I went to the Edinburgh Global Partnership,” relates Foulkes, “and I happened to speak to the people who are going to Malawi to build a road. I was really impressed by the commitment of them. And I think to say that students are apathetic is completely wrong.”

But student GMs are rarely quorate, I protest. MacWhirter is having none of it: “I was at this university in the 1970s, the high tide of student radicalism...”

Foulkes wants his share of the bragging rights. “No, no, no! ’69 was the high tide,” he recalls with a sublimely wistful air. What was it, I wonder: the sex, the drugs or the rock ‘n’ roll? Best not to ask.

“I would say that students today are far better informed about the issues,” resumes MacWhirter, “than they were in my day, when all you needed to do was shout ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Out, out, out!’”

As for Galloway, he seems positively misty-eyed as he attributes the low turnout at one lunch-time lecture to students “stacking shelves in Tesco, because they can’t afford to make ends meet” – touchingly ignoring the possibility that many might simply have stayed at home to watch Neighbours. Say what you will of these candidates’ quirks and flaws, each seems improbably fond of Edinburgh’s students. We'll see how far the affection is reciprocated when the results come in.