Boris Johnson is a clever politician, so I never feared seeing him in 10 Downing Street... until this week

The one thing that has remained consistent about the incoming prime minister is his lack of respect for women

Over the years, and especially around Boris Johnson’s first leadership attempt in 2016, I would note in conversation that I thought he was an incredibly intelligent man. I’ve said it again recently, too, and each time the response has been either a peal of laughter or immediate dismissal.

I stand by it. Johnson has always been a man with a plan.

With that in mind, although I too have seen him as the careless fool we often see – the guy most often found rugby tackling children, falling into a river or dangling from a zipwire – I’d never been fearful of a Johnson premiership. Not genuinely. I’d expressed concerns that he might send the country into chaos, but I was never scared of seeing him inside No 10.

That is, until this week.

Until a spokesperson for Boris Johnson said that the government inquiry into Mark Field, the junior foreign office minister, would be dropped. The inquiry was into an incident in which Field grabbed a Greenpeace protester by the neck and marched her out of a dinner at Mansion House. The reason given for suspending the inquiry was that it had been “a matter for the previous PM”.

Louise Haigh, the shadow policing minister, put it perfectly when she said that this was “a test of Boris Johnson’s attitude towards women”. He didn’t pass it.

Compare the incident with the case against Paul Crowther. He was the person who threw a milkshake at Nigel Farage earlier this year while on the campaign trail. Since this moment, Crowther been fired from his job and forced to pay Farage’s dry-cleaning bill.

Now I’m not condoning his moment of milkshake madness, but for Crowther to lose his job while Field is able to remain in the Conservative Party is a mad insult to every woman in the country. (Field’s removal from his post in the Foreign Office only came about because he was a close ally of the outgoing foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt.)

To Johnson, this may have been a case of wiping the slate clean, immediately canning anything Theresa May left in her in tray. But the effect is dangerous: it suggests that violence and intimidation towards women is OK.

Johnson has set a precedent for his tenure. He may have Priti Patel as his right-hand woman, but he’s not known for paying much attention to women’s rights. Only recently he refused to acknowledge the domestic disturbance in which he was involved at the home of his partner, Carrie Symonds. The offence was not insignificant; neighbours could hear her yelling of the phrase “get off me” and Symonds was overheard asking him to leave her flat.

And yet this is not the first domestic misdemeanour for Johnson. Over the years, journalists have lost count of the number of affairs he has had, and the children he has fathered as a result of those dalliances. And what about the time he said that the only reason more women now attend university was because of their desire to find a husband?

YouGov data yesterday revealed that the Tories are climbing in the opinion polls – but only with men. Johnson apparently only received an increase of one per cent (up to 29 per cent) among women, compared with a jump from 23 per cent to 35 per cent for male voters.

That’s no surprise when the one thing that has remained consistent about Johnson is his lack of respect for women.

Women who have been on the receiving end of cowardly male behaviour know only too well how serious an issue this is, and it’s not one that should be swept under the carpet.

This is what scares me, and it should scare every other woman in the UK.