Norman Fowler: Gay Icon?

'There are heroes in politics whose virtue goes almost unremarked. In the Lords this week Norman Fowler (as Baron Fowler of Sutton Coldfield) has been quietly pushing through a measure to allow migrants to Britain, including those not lawfully here, to be treated for HIV/Aids.
'It was he who, as Health Secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s Government in 1986, took this country down the track of an energetic, expensive, positive, honest, generous response to the Aids crisis, launching a massive advertising campaign and helping us to lead Europe in grappling openly with the threat. And he’s still here, still “boring”, still the last man on Earth to want to be a gay icon, or any kind of icon, still patiently engaging with the machinery of public administration, still showing how government can matter and how politics can be worthwhile.'

Matthew Parris pays tribute to his former parliamentary colleague, Norman Fowler, in The Times.
Parris neglects to mention that Fowler's Aids awareness campaigns in the 80s were done despite the indifference of Margaret Thatcher to the Aids crisis, and the hostility of several cabinet members.* 
It's worth noting how there was no tabloid hysteria over the new measure, despite its conflation of three red buttons; "migrants", the NHS and HIV.

* See The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of Aids - Simon Garfield, page 107.