Ian or Iain? True blue or turncoat? Trivial or not, questions multiply for the Tory leader

However enjoyable the latest fuss over when and why Iain Duncan Smith acquired the second "I" in his name, it is hardly make or break for the Tory leader's reputation. It would be nice to think it was inserted as a homage to the great Tory chancellor Iain Macleod, though that is not one of several explanations furnished this week by Tory officials. Indeed it is possible that Mr Macleod, one of Kenneth Clarke's political heroes, is too centrist and one-nation a figure to be a suitable Duncan Smith role model.

But it is hard to disagree with the party spokesman who suggested that "even the most dedicated political anorak would find it hard to get excited about all this". Indeed it would hardly be worth mentioning if it did not follow the renewed focus – after a report this week by BBC Newsnight's Michael Crick – on the modest but unmistakable discrepancies in the Conservative leader's CV.

These were that he did not attend the University of Perugia but a less prestigious language school in the same city, from which he has confirmed he emerged without qualifications; and that the extent to which he was "educated at Dunchurch College of Management" was limited to six courses of a few days each. If, as this suggests, Mr Duncan Smith has a bit of a complex about his educational background, he should not have. After all, Lord Callaghan of Cardiff and John Major – who despite his high intelligence was famously reticent about the number of his O-levels – became prime ministers without having gone to university. It is true Mr Duncan Smith would much rather emulate Baroness Thatcher, a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, than Mr Major, whose government he did much to destabilise. But the reasons are ideological and not educational.

Nevertheless, it does create a question mark about his inner self-confidence, in the same way as his somewhat imprecise claim in January 2001 to one of the local newspapers in his constituency that he "turned down government appointments" during Mr Major's premiership because he disagreed with that same government over Europe. This provoked a firm retort from Mr Major that Mr Duncan Smith "was never offered a front-bench job".

What actually happened, Mr Duncan Smith explained later, was that Jonathan Aitken, who was a minister at the time, long before he became one of the Conservative Party's most notorious figures, proposed to him the post of Parliamentary Private Secretary – the lowest, and unpaid, form of governmental life. Maybe the whips would have approved such an appointment; maybe not. But in any case that did not arise because Mr Duncan Smith did indeed turn it down.

Other than in a few details, the story is not new. Nor is it fatal, though it would have created rather more excitement if Mr Duncan Smith had been prime minister. Politicians who are caught out not violating but slightly stretching the truth, even on issues as trivial and negligible as these, always run the risk that they may be trusted less on things that are vastly more important. Given his soldierly image of the "what you see is what you get" plain man, there is arguably a much larger – and more political – issue of the Duncan Smith identity than a few harmless tweaks to his CV.

To take a single example, he has skilfully succeeded where William Hague did not, in subordinating the issue of Europe in the Tory party to the much more voter-friendly issue of public services. In doing so, he has managed rather well to project the image of a Tory leadership no longer obsessed with that divisive subject. Yet this is the same leader who between 1994 and 1997 made a series of public statements indicating his preparedness to contemplate withdrawal from the EU, and who in John Major's eloquent words last year "was one of a number of colleagues who voted night after night with the Labour Party in the Labour lobby with the purpose of defeating the Conservative government."

Can a man who put the issue of Europe above the party then have lost so much interest in it five years later?

Inevitably, the same questions arise on the domestic front. When Neil Kinnock, as leader of the Opposition, started to move his party back to the centre, he did so because he had decided in every fibre of his being – a revolutionary view in early 1980s Labour – that the party and not the voters had been wrong. Has Mr Duncan Smith made a similar discovery? Is he stressing his concern for the vulnerable and even more his willingness to "modernise" the Tory party on social issues because he thinks it is electorally necessary or because he really believes it?

That is a much bigger question about the true identity of Iain Duncan Smith than which Umbrian higher education institution he attended nearly 30 years ago.