Tony Abbott remembered as right-wing activist during time as Rhodes scholar at Oxford

In the Oxford University rugby team in the autumn of 1981, there was a loosehead prop with a mixed reputation. "He was a good scrummager," says Phil Crowe, the captain at the time. "He could scrounge on the ground for the ball. He did all the technical things pretty well."

In confrontations, he never took a backward step. Sometimes he took a forward one: if an opposing player was giving him a hard time, "he was a bit of a pugilist. He had a quick right jab."

Tony Abbott has not lost those instincts. The right-wing favourite to win the election in Australia on Saturday does not shy away from confrontation. His years as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford from 1981 to 1983 left a lasting impression. His biographers agree that Oxford was important to him, possibly pivotal.

Abbott was born in England and moved to Australia in 1960. He was an adored only son with three younger sisters. He followed an increasingly pressured route through ambitious Jesuit schools to grand, Oxford-influenced Sydney University. There he became a notorious activist, leading an aggressive right-wing revolt against the left-wing campus orthodoxies of the late 1970s.

There were allegations of physically threatening behaviour, including punching a wall on either side of the head of a rival student politician, Barbara Ramjan. This month Ramjan received an apology from News Corp Australia, which had claimed that her account of the episode was fictitious.

Abbott was also accused of groping an activist, Helen Wilson, while she was speaking at a meeting. He was charged with indecent and common assault, but acquitted after saying he had "tapped her on the back, about the level of her jeans belt".