Earlier in the week he was denying he was gay, but yesterday Lib-Dem leadership candidate Simon Hughes confirmed he'd had gay relationships. Nick Morrison looks at whether sexuality is still an issue in politics.

IT was a wet Saturday afternoon in Rugby and, with just a handful of words, one of the most junior of MPs was about to make history. "My name is Chris Smith," he began. "I'm the Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, and I'm gay."

He was not the first gay MP. He was not even the first gay MP whose sexuality had become public. But he was the first gay MP to come out of his own accord.

That was 1984. Previously, exposure as gay invariably led to disgrace and loss of office. Just six years earlier, Northampton MP Maureen Colquhoun had been hounded from Parliament after revelations she had moved in with another woman. Former Speaker of the Commons George Thomas lived in terror that his secret life would be discovered, even paying one blackmailer to move to Australia.

But Chris Smith's candour was to transform the climate, and his subsequent re-elections with successively increased majorities confounded the prediction that the voters would not accept a gay MP. No longer did it have to be a shameful secret, wrung out of embarrassed politicians.

Progress was sometimes painfully slow, however. Indeed, it took a further 13 years for another MP to volunteer the information. But New Labour's 1997 landslide saw, for the first time, an MP elected despite being openly gay. Four openly gay Labour MPs arrived that year, including Stephen Twigg, whose victory over Michael Portillo in Enfield proved the defining moment of the night for many.

But not all gay MPs have felt able to be so open about their sexuality. While Chris Smith could get away with it with the metropolitan voters of trendy Islington, colleagues in working class constituencies were, perhaps naturally, more reticent. Newcastle MP Nick Brown came clean only after a former partner tried to sell his story to the News of the World, while former Hartlepool MP Peter Mandelson was said to be furious after he was outed live on television by former Tory MP Matthew Parris.

Among this number can now be added Simon Hughes, candidate for the LibDem leadership. Mr Hughes revealed yesterday that he'd had gay relationships, as well as straight ones, in the past, although only after The Sun obtained evidence that he had phoned a gay chat line.

For some the issue is one of honesty. Asked by The Independent earlier this week whether he was gay, he said he wasn't. For others, it is a question of hypocrisy. Mr Hughes was first elected in a vicious by-election notable for the homophobic smears levelled against his gay Labour opponent, Peter Tatchell.

Mr Hughes could legitimately argue that his denial was not untrue and his relationships with both men and women meant he was difficult to pigeon hole, and he has previously apologised for the way the 1983 by-election was conducted.

His reluctance to talk about his private life may suggest he has some qualms about how the voters will react, but the evidence is that it has little effect on a politician's career, according to Alan Wardle, spokesman for gay rights group Stonewall.

"What we are finding is that, increasingly, the general public don't care about the sexuality of their MPs. The issue for the public is being open and honest about it," he says. He adds that when Mr Hughes first became an MP it was harder to be open, and the more time went on the more difficult it would have been to make an announcement about his sexuality.

Openly gay MPs have been noticeably thinner on the ground in the Tory Party than among Labour or the LibDems. The generational difference - with the Conservatives tending to have both older activists and voters - may at least partly explain why just one Tory MP has voluntarily come out to date, Alan Duncan in 2002.

He was not the first openly gay Tory MP, however. That was Michael Brown, who resigned as a government whip in 1994 after he was revealed to have gone on holiday with another man. He subsequently lost his seat.

And Michael Portillo's campaign for the Tory leadership in 2001 was hampered by his confirmation he had gay relationships while at university. Evidence that some elements of the party remained resistant to progress came when Lord Tebbit backed Iain Duncan Smith in that contest, on the grounds he was a "normal, family man with children", although the result did the party no favours in the long run.

But the evidence that a gay candidate is an electoral disadvantage is becoming an increasingly harder line to hold. Alan Duncan increased his majority by almost 50 per cent at the last election, and even suggestions that Northern working class constituencies may be less accepting of a gay MP is not borne out by the evidence.

After Peter Mandelson's involuntary outing, the Hartlepool Mail conducted a poll of 1,000 of his constituents, and a remarkable 94 per cent said it didn't matter that their MP was gay. Nor did his majority suffer at the subsequent election.

But if gay MPs no longer turn a hair, the country is probably not yet ready for a gay leader of a mainstream party, says Martin Farr, history lecturer at Newcastle University, and this is particularly apparent at a time of fertility among party leaders. With Tony Blair a dad of four, Gordon Brown - himself once a target of innuendo that he was gay - to become a dad for the second time, and Tory leader David Cameron expecting his third child, it is not a good time to be gay and single.

"It would be difficult to talk about hard-working families in that position, and I think it has done Simon Hughes some damage," Dr Farr says. "It is just like if you were casting a film: it would be hard to have a romantic leading man who was known to be gay.

"There are still some people who might be put off, although not as many as there were, and, as a package, he would be a less saleable commodity." It seems there may still be some way to go before we're ready for our first gay prime minister."