The issue is not with whom he flirted or dallied on the banks of the Cam all those years ago.
No. Really. Emphatically not. And rid yourselves of any notion please that homophobia might be skilfully deployed or exploited in the run-up to what promises to be the most spectacular by-election of this parliament.
According to Peter Hitchens - Express columnist and author of The Abolition of Britain - by far the most worrying revelation about the schoolboy Michael Portillo is that he had a picture of Harold Wilson taped to his locker.
"Trotsky or Che Guevara I could understand," declares Mr Hitchens in a splendidly outraged Spectator article declaring his own candidacy for Kensington and Chelsea: "But Harold Wilson? Homosexual flirtations on the banks of the Cam seem to me a good deal easier to explain than a sixth-form identification with that dreadful, unprincipled trimmer and phoney."
Mr Hitchens is distinctly unimpressed by Mr Portillo's "reinvention" since his general election defeat in 1997. The free expression of a more caring, compassionate, even sentimental side; the doubts about absolute codes of sexual morals; the proposed greater tolerance of those choosing alternative lifestyles to marriage, and the seeming awareness of the damage done to the Tories by the perception at least that they were out to persecute single mothers . . .
These are regarded not as reinvention, in fact, but as the probable emergence of Mr Portillo's "true self."
Mr Hitchens sees this re-positioning in the context of a future leadership challenge. There are plenty of grounds for criticising William Hague, he says, not least over his acceptance of the "surrender to the IRA in Northern Ireland" and his failure to silence Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke.
And a good row on these and other issues, such as the state of the police and "the collapse" of the criminal justice system, he argues, could drag the Tory Party away from "the middle ground where it fights on issues chosen by Labour into areas where it could win back the great voiceless coalition so ignored and mistreated by John Major."
But Mr Portillo, he charges, has mostly picked upon issues which make life easier, not harder, for Tony Blair. And he sees "strange parallels" between Mr Portillo's behaviour and that of Lady Thatcher, "who allowed people to think she rather approved of Mr Blair during the Major era."
This, Mr Hitchens suggests, cannot simply be attributed to the bilious loathing the Thatcher camp felt for Mr Major; these people were too intelligent not to realise they were helping a Labour victory. "So," he ventures: "perhaps there really is a synthesis between Thatcherism, which was liberalism dressed up as proper reactionary Conservatism, and Blairism, which is liberalism draped in public piety and proclaimed alongside a noisy social conscience."
Perhaps, he continues, "the younger Thatcherites really do not feel all that uncomfortable with the decline in marriage, the end of hierarchy in education and the death of the class system, provided they can have low income taxes - something the Blair government can give them certainly in the short term, though perhaps not in the long run."
The real point, to Mr Hitchens at least, is that such young Thatcherites - like Mr Portillo himself - are not really Tories at all. "Proper Toryism is, as I am, reactionary," he declares: "It likes a certain amount of authority. Its gorge rises at `libertarian' arguments for the legalisation of drugs. It defends the hereditary position on principle and prizes loyalty, not least in Northern Ireland. It is willing to spend public money, especially on soldiers and warships, and it believes in the punishment of wickedness."
Reactionary . . . warships . . . punishment . . . wickedness. This is all so manifestly unfashionable as to invite the conclusion that Mr Hitchens is not to be taken seriously. Indeed, some commentators have concluded that his candidacy for the Tory nomination in Kensington and Chelsea is but an elaborate device to promote his book. But Mr Portillo might be a touch more cautious as he prepares for the lengthy selection battle.
A Tory writer recently offered the view that London is now akin to New York, by which he meant that the opinions and agenda of the glitterati-literati-chattering-metropolitan-elite is wholly unrepresentative of the country as a whole.
He also just happens to be a burgher of "K&C" and a fullypaid-up member of the local Conservative Party. So Mr Hitchens is assured at least one vote, and this local source does not consider himself a lone reactionary by any means. For all that he must fear Mr Portillo's return to Westminster could spell a permanent incipient leadership challenge, Mr Hague has indicated a warm welcome for his former colleague's expected return to the front rank of British politics.
The leader will doubtless hope that Mr Portillo's selection and election will confirm the degree to which his party has indeed changed since it was so contemptuously kicked out of office. But he, and many others, will be watching the split for evidence, too, of the degree to which it has not.