Deputy Prime Minister. This entirely misses the personal nature of what Alan Duncan has done. He is a senior MP and a respected authority in the Conservative Party and Parliament. He is a front bench spokesman on Foreign Affairs, specialising in the Middle East and other global hotspots. He is popular with staff and colleagues. At the same time, he is an intensely private man. To declare publicly at the age of 45 that he is gay is a typically courageous act. Most of us have had to do something similar, but without stakes quite as high and without it leading an entire day's news agenda. To say, then, that Mr Duncan has chosen to say this purely to hide an inflated story about David Davis getting a new job is absurd.

There has, as ever, been the occasional voice of concern from the fast-dwindling traditional wing of the Party.

Jean Searle, the former president of the Conservatives' National Convention (who, they?), declared that 'South of the Watford Gap people accept homosexuality as a norm. I don't think the north of England has quite accepted it in the same way. What disturbs me is people feel they have to come out and say what they are. We don't come out and say we are normal and happily married with 2.4 children'. This may surprise many readers. If Mrs Searle would care to accompany me to Manchester's Canal Street, she will find a many straight people enjoying the safe, friendly atmosphere that the gay community has created in its own bars, clubs and restaurants. The south does not have a monopoly on live and let live - there are plenty of decent, accepting people in the north of the country too. If her comments were not so comical they may be a cause for concern.

Of course the media also went to the usual suspect, Ann Widdecombe. She said that the Conservatives should be talking about health, education and transport - not sexuality. She is only half wrong. I'm not sure when she last attended Prime Minister's Questions, but Iain Duncan Smith talks about nothing else!

The public care passionately about these three areas - they care whether their grandmother can get a hip operation, whether their kids go to a decent school, and whether they can get to work on time in the mornings. But they also, increasingly so, care about the kind of people they are voting for. The Conservative Party through the 80's became defined not by what they were for, but what they were against - an image to a certain extent perpetuated by William Hague's leadership. The Conservatives are therefore addressing not just the policy issues - where the public has a problem with Labour, but issues of sexuality, gender and race - where the public has a problem with the Conservatives.

Hague did not benefit from Labour's failure on public services and transport. The reason, and this is what Ann Widdecombe misunderstands, is that he did not prove a worthy recipient of the public's trust.

This is what the changing nature of the Conservative Party is all about. It needs to reflect the full diversity of the society it seeks to represent. Only by making itself 'open, decent and tolerant' can it hope to be worthy of office.

Iain Duncan Smith is acutely aware of the need to build an empathetic relationship with all communities. Allied to his fundamental belief that it is for the individual to live their own life and not for the State to live it for them, this provides a powerful opportunity for the Conservatives to become the champions of the gay community.

Alan Duncan's openness, and the Party's warm response to it, can only help move this forward. So yes, his coming out does matter, not because of what it says about him, but because of what it says about the changing Conservative Party.