SO the Conservative Party finally has an openly gay MP. Well done guys, we're only two years into the 21st century. Whatever next? A Tory storming the party conference podium to declare: "I don't care who knows it - I'm a vege-tarian!"?

Alan Duncan's "outing" in The Times on Monday was supposed to make the Tories appear modern and inclusive. It has done the reverse.

For the ageing reactionaries in the party, the news gives them something else to chunter about. "I mean, old boy, he doesn't look like one of them," they will grumble to the golf club barman. "He seemed perfectly normal - navy suit, good shoes, hair a bit suspicious but not an earring in sight. No wonder he sneaked past the constituency party."

For the rest of the country, the revelation only emphasises how backward the Tories still are.

Labour has several openly gay MPs, two of whom rose to be Cabinet ministers. Their sexuality has done no harm to either their electoral hopes or their career plans. As Mr Duncan puts it, "Nobody under 35 gives a damn about being gay these days but they feel repelled by people who sneer and condemn."

By making an issue of it, the Tories will continue to repel the tolerant majority. We don't give a damn, but they obviously do.

This is the party, after all, which would not elect Michael Portillo as leader after he admitted to having gay experiences; Lord Tebbit preferred the successful candidate Iain Duncan-Smith because, sneered the peer, he was a "normal, family man with children".

This is also the party that continues to back section 28, the useless and discriminatory law to stop councils "promoting homosexuality as equiv-alent to marriage". That makes the Tories about as inclusive as the members-only bar at the House of Commons.

Alan Duncan's disclosure looks suspiciously stage-managed. It comes only days after Iain Duncan Smith sacked Walmgate's own David Davis as party chairman and installed Theresa May, the first woman to take the role in the party's long history.

IDS told the press that it was a symbolic change that showed "the Conservative Party is an open, decent and tolerant party". (He did the explaining so Mrs May did not have to trouble her pretty little head. She just stood there looking fragrant.)

Now, after 15 years at the heart of Tory politics keeping his private life private, Alan Duncan has chosen this precise moment to go public about being gay. Coincidence? I don't think so. He's been booted out of the closet to bolster IDS's caring, sharing message.

How crass. You can imagine Tory Central Office ticking off each category of MP as they go: "We've got a black one, we got a woman one, we've got a gay one. Now we only need a Rasta-farian one and a disabled one and we've got the set."

Even that other creaky old institution, the Church of England, has beaten the Tories to it. Last week Dr Rowan Williams was confirmed as the Archbishop of Canterbury. He knowingly ordained gay priests long before Iain Duncan Smith jumped aboard the Inclusive Express.

And the national tabloids caught on earlier than the Tories. When the Sun came up with a front page headline asking whether Britain was being run by "a gay mafia" it became a laughing stock, and has the paper since adjusted its stance accordingly.

Having said all that, it is quite true to say that MPs such as Alan Duncan will turn people off the Tories.

Why? Because he is a white, rich, middle class, ex-public schoolboy Oxbridge graduate like almost all of the rest of them.

Updated: 10:23 Wednesday, July 31, 2002