Matthew Parris: "I'm a completely crap gay"

The openly amphibious parliamentary sketch writer, Matthew Parris, is interviewed for TotalPolitics by Iain Dale.
They're both gay Conservatives, so it's all very chummy and polite.
Maybe it's down to his boyish good looks, but he's usually presented as one of the nice guys, though his politics are perfectly ghastly.
Parris talks about his admiration for scary right-wing nutjob Keith Joseph ("He seemed to say the things that I was thinking but no one else dared to say..."), and David Cameron - "I believe David Cameron is going to be a great prime minister."
His old boss - Margaret Thatcher - was fine with him being gay, and he offers a word of warning to gay men going into politics; "What gay men who are not really out need to beware of (and Peter Mandelson notwithstanding, this is a warning not a threat), is the status of being a little bit gay and suspected of being gay but not having admitted it, because it really whets the media's appetite. Either you stay right in the closet, or if you've edged a little way out, for God's sake, come all the way out quickly. There is no status, although Peter Mandelson hoped there would be, in your homosexuality being "private but not secret". It's public or it's nothing."
It's most odd that Dale didn't press Parris about his outing of Mandelson, especially as it's been back in the news again this week, but that's chummy interviews for you.
No, he doesn't want to be a role model ("I do hope not. I'm a completely crap gay") and wishes he'd come out earlier.
"I wish now that I had come out when I was a Conservative MP. I think I could have got away with it in retrospect, but it would have been a close run thing. I had the nicest constituency and the nicest association and it would have given them an awful shock. A lot of them, I'm sure, had their doubts already and I think I could have ridden the storm. I so much admire Chris Smith for taking the risk."
Labour's Chris Smith is in the history books as the first MP to come out voluntarily, when he was a Labour MP in 1984.
Fagburn appears to be the only person in the world - including Matthew Parris - who seems to recall that Mr Parris actually came out a few years before Smith did, in a speech he made in the House Of Commons in the early 80s.
Problem was no-one took the slightest bit of notice, so Parris quietly went back in again.