Brief encounters (or gay Tories I have known)

One of the paradoxes of the times is that privacy is regarded as a fundamental human right while, simultaneously, self-revelation is praised as one of the higher virtues. Thus the Press Complaints Commission and Her Majesty's judges are criticised, with equal justification, for failing to establish clear rules about intrusions into private life. At the same time it is impossible to get a book into the best-seller lists (apart from one on cookery or astrology) unless it is about the author's intimate and usually disagreeable experiences at the hands of parents, teachers, spouses, lovers, children or, preferably, all of them.

Last week we had an addition to the genre with Mr Alan Duncan's "confession", in an interview in The Times, that he was homosexual. I enclose the word in inverted commas because that was the way it was put in the papers which followed up the story. It was not the way Mr Duncan put it himself. To him, it was a fact of life, the way he was made. He accepted his condition in the same spirit as Thomas Carlyle advised his female interlocutor to accept the universe.

This was wholly to his credit. In his place I should, I hope, have said: "Mind your own bloody business." This reflects merely a difference of temperament. It is not a moral issue. To those who came afterwards to comment on Mr Duncan's answer, however, this was precisely what it was. Mr Duncan had been confronted by a test which he had passed triumphantly. He had won the race, cleared the bar and jumped over the sandpit. He duly took his place on the podium while the band played whatever a band would play these days for a victorious Tory.

The party had shown it was tolerant, inclusive, above all, up-to-date. Mr Iain Duncan Smith bestowed his personal seal of approval on Mr Duncan before going off on his holidays. It can only be a matter of time, indeed, before he is in the Shadow Cabinet. In fact – meaning, as people usually do on these occasions, in my opinion – he would thoroughly deserve his place. With Mr Oliver Letwin, he is among the few Tories with any ideas at all.

That they are of an often uncomfortably libertarian character merely adds to their attraction. Mr Duncan Smith is, temperamentally, wholly opposed to this way of looking at the world; more so than Mr William Hague ever was. But for the moment the Conservative leader finds it politically convenient to affect toleration and easygoing ways. This is based on the assumption, derived from the success of Mr Tony Blair, that a modern political leader must combine the morals of a timeshare salesman with the manners of a chatshow host who has briefly enjoyed a period of higher education. Though that was not a benefit which Mr Duncan Smith received (the University of Perugia was a language school), the effect to aim for is the Blair effect.

Only two disobliging notes were sounded, both fairly predictable. Lord Tebbit said he was "bored", which is what enlightened folk usually say when they are asked about pornography. Miss Ann Widdecombe inquired: "So what?" I had some sympathy with Miss Widdecombe's response, but should have had more if she had not recently appeared, with her sainted mother, as a willing victim of Mr Louis Theroux while they went on some cruise or other. True, Mr Theroux – whose technique of insinuating "I'm your friend" is remarkably similar to Mr Blair's – did not get much out of her, still less out of her mother. But Miss Widdecombe convincingly confirmed that she was at least as interested in personal publicity as in political policy.

The Conservative Party has always been remarkably tolerant of homosexuality. The case of Ian Harvey, who had to resign from a junior Foreign Office post in 1958 after committing an "indecent act" with a guardsman in St James's Park, was cited time and again last week as an illustration of the supposedly bad old days. He was written about as if he had shortly been due to enter No 10. Recently John Profumo and Jonathan Aitken have both been described in the same inflated way. Harvey was an agreeable, witty ad-man who might, just, have got into the Cabinet. The same fate would have befallen him today, as it did Mr Ron ("Moment of madness") Davies after his adventures on Clapham Common.

But others prospered. Alan Lennox-Boyd was a homosexual who became Colonial Secretary. There was a whole string of baronets, knights and misters who were either junior ministers or leading backbenchers. One of the most colourful members of Margaret Thatcher's first Cabinet, who regularly claimed to be chaste but not celibate, contributed equally to the gaiety of nations and to the public life of this country.

With someone else, her Parliamentary Private Secretary at the time of her fall, Mrs Thatcher was taking an enormous risk. This was Peter Morrison. He would sometimes be moved on from public lavatories by the police.

"Dear oh dear if it isn't Mr Morrison again. You've got a home to go to, haven't you, sir? Well, my advice to you is to go to it."

In those days I would sometimes visit a club which was open for Sunday supper, as most such places were not. Almost always Morrison and Alan Clark would be there as well. On one occasion Morrison was enjoying a preliminary drink with a good-looking young man.

"I suppose that's Peter's latest fancy," I hazarded to Clark.

"Honestly," Clark said, "sometimes you can be so incredibly bloody naive. That happens to be Peter's minder."

I expressed puzzlement. Clark explained he was the young man from the ministry charged with keeping his master out of trouble for the evening. Morrison would then have been at the Department of Energy. Mrs Thatcher made him her PPS because, after the departure of Ian Gow, she took the view that it was unfair to ask any but rich men to occupy the post, because their political careers were being interrupted. Morrison was certainly rich and his career was by no means unsuccessful, though he never struck me as being happy as he was going about it.

All the Tories, however, assume Lilliputian proportions when set beside Tom Driberg, whose preferred activity was fellatio and who was not nearly such an agreeable character as that portrayed by Sir Michael Gambon in a play five years ago. He could be a terrible nuisance. I was one of the few Westminster journalists never to receive an advance from him. Driberg was not a minister, but he did become a church commissioner and a life peer. For over 30 years he was a leading figure in the People's Party. No one ever asked Tom about his sexuality. It was only too obvious – though whether it was so to those comrades who regularly elected him to the National Executive Committee is another matter.