When in the the summer the Schools Minister Nick Gibb announced he would marry his male partner of 29 years, there was passing media coverage but not even the twitch of an eyebrow. Times have changed for gay MPs; how much so is illustrated by Michael Bloch’s absorbing, gossipy if highly debatable account.Coming soon after his monumental life of Jeremy Thorpe, Bloch shows himself an equally skilled exponent of the potted biography. But as to “closeted”, while it is true that lives would have been ruined had their sexuality become public, the proclivities and activities of many of the 50 or so politicians he discusses were known within their (wide) social circles. Jeremy Thorpe, publicly discreet, twice married and the father of a child, imitated a not untypical earlier ga