Boris Johnson's Tory way with women

Boris Johnson and women. I know what you're thinking. I'm thinking it too. I'm not going to mention it, though. Instead, I'm going to alert you to the two cheers he received from the power behind Boris Keep Your Promise, the vigorous campaign to ensure that the London mayor honours a headline crime manifesto pledge to: "Help the ignored victims of sexual violence by providing desperately needed long-term funding for new Rape Crisis Centres to help the ignored victims of sexual violence – a horrendous crime that is on the increase." As a mayoral candidate, Johnson asserted that "rape is under-reported" and undertook to "release funds that Ken Livingstone has earmarked for his own personal press officers" to support London's only existing centre in Croydon and create three more. It hasn't worked out quite that way. He rowed back on the spending and the number of mayoral press officers actually in post is practically unchanged (Johnson is, after all, the "good news mayor"). But then he and his bike got ambushed , and now he has pooled resources with a group of London boroughs to ensure there will be four centres after all. The Promise campaign is rightly concerned about their longer-term financial future, but nonetheless welcomed Johnson's announcement on International Women's Day as "a leap forward for vulnerable women in London". The centres will be a fine achievement of Johnson's first term and an intriguing one politically. His original pledge was all the more welcome for being so surprising. It doesn't take much of a forage in the Conservative backwoods to unearth victim-blaming viewpoints about women and rape, and here's a Tory grassroots hero making common cause with those horrid feminists. Why did he embrace this issue and give it such prominence? Perhaps it's something to do with gallantry. That quality is, of course, distinctly double-edged – a tricky blend of an urge to protect and deference rooted in condescension. We've seen the truth of the latter revealed recently in public exchanges between Johnson and critics among female London Assembly members. His habitual tactic when under distaff scrutiny is to gently scold and flirt, perhaps congratulating inquisitors on their attempts to seduce him with some alluring proposition (to do with buses or bicycles, you understand). Alas, of late there have been few examples of blushing and yielding and, forced on to the defensive, Johnson's answers have let slip a caustic, patronising streak: " Dear Nicky "; " My dear Joanne ". Shades of port, cigars and gentlemen's clubs. It's easy to forget that Johnson is younger than Jarvis Cocker. But then there is the noble side of gallantry, and we know that Johnson has that in him too . His famous rescue of Plane Stupid director Franny Armstrong from would-be muggers is uncontested evidence of that. So maybe there we have it, boys and girls. Johnson embodies of a certain sort of old-school masculinity – the decent and the dismissive side-by-side.