Craig Murray, Her Majesty’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan whose career came to an abrupt end when he refused to toe the Foreign Office line on state-sponsored brutality and/or sex with strippers, is telling me about his new book when he suddenly breaks off in the middle of a sentence.

“There’s the new delivery of condoms,” he says enthusiastically pointing out the window of Dundee university’s student union bar. “We’ve been waiting for these.”

As rector, he is here for Freshers’ Week where his responsibilities include handing out prophylactics to hormonally-charged youth. Their mothers would no doubt thank him but you can’t help feeling that, even when discussing serious matters — his foreign policy blueprint for an independent Scotland — sex is never far from his mind.

Murray is as renowned for his extra-curricular activities as he is for his whistle-blowing, both of which were given a thorough airing in his memoir Murder In Samarkand, which Michael Winterbottom is turning into a film starring Steve Coogan. In the book there are 15 entries in the index under “Women: attraction to”. His lover Nadira Aleiva, whom he met when she was working in a strip club in Tashkent and for whom he left his wife Fiona, has performed a one-woman play about their relationship — The British Ambassador’s Belly Dancer. Given that he admits to a string of girlfriends and mistresses during the 20 years he was married, doesn’t Nadira worry about him in Dundee with all these pretty students? “Yes,” he says.

In the flesh, Murray is a more engaging character than the seedier parts of his autobiography or the self-righteous polemic of his blog would suggest. He is good company, relaxed and amenable, the sort of chap with whom one could easily share a platter of Ferrero Rocher chocolate sweets.

He is working on three books: a biography of the early 19th century explorer and diplomat Alexander Burnes, with whom he sees parallels in his own downfall; a book on foreign policy in an independent Scotland and the second instalment of his memoirs, The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known. Much to Murray’s intense frustration, Mainstream, its publisher, is picking through the manuscript after legal threats from Lt-Col Tim Spicer, the Scots Guards officer turned mercenary. The lack of a book will not stop Murray fulfilling his duties at the Wigtown Book Festival next week.

In an earlier era, Murray would have been, not an author but a character. He is the archetypal Graham Greene anti-hero — flawed, guilt-ridden, arrogant, brilliant, high-flying and a maverick. He may be a throw-back to an era when burlesque and Bollinger were as much part of the diplomatic bag as treaties and trade missions, but Murray’s story encapsulates a modern dilemma. How much should private integrity impinge on public morality?

There is no doubt that he uncovered some extremely disturbing goings-on in Uzbekistan. A University of Glasgow pathology report on one victim of the regime gave cause of death as “immersion in boiling liquid”. Post-mortem photographs of an 18-year-old boy showed a right hand that looked like “cooked chicken”. Murray was told of victims being strapped into gas masks with blocked filters so that they would suffocate without bruising. Then he discovered that the information extracted under these conditions was being accepted by Western intelligence services. In his eyes, Britain is complicit in the torture.

Between 2002 and 2004, he found himself increasingly caught between geopolitical considerations and his concern for the people living under a despotic leader. He sent a number of increasingly urgent memos only to be confronted by what the diplomat Carne Ross describes as the Foreign Office’s “culture of amorality”. When the Whitehall mandarins realised Murray could not be silenced, they turned the spotlight on his private life.

Although all the charges against him, including that he traded visas for sex were dropped, the fact that Murray, a self-confessed womaniser, habitually frequented strip joints detracted from the moral imperative of what he was revealing. As the Washington Post remarked, there was undoubtedly a case to be made. It was just unfortunate that Murray was the one making it.

“I spent my first year trying to change things through the official channels,” he says. “That is when they came up with all these allegations of bad conduct. Nothing will ever convince me that these charges weren’t simply cooked up.”

But they didn’t need much cooking, merely gentle heating. In her show, Nadira, who at 21 was half Murray’s age when they met, reveals that when she first saw the ambassador — “wet meat” in the slang of the strippers — he was with “two of the more obvious Russian girls”. Before he left, Murray tucked $20 (£11) into Nadira’s heavily embroidered knickers and suggested she call him.

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