CONSERVATIVE Boris Johnson sensationally ousted Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London last night in a famous victory completing Gordon Brown's personal nightmare and sealing Labour's worst local election results for forty years.
The beleaguered Prime Minister was already battling to restore his authority and credibility before the Tory triumph was declared after a day of mounting excitement at City Hall amid even heavier-than-expected Labour losses in the contests across England and Wales.
Mr Johnson led Mr Livingstone by 1,043,761 votes (43%) to 893,877 (37%) on the first count. After the other eight candidates were eliminated the second preference votes were allocated, with 124,977 going to Mr Johnson and 133,089 to Mr Livingstone. Mr Johnson was then finally declared the winner with 1,168,738 votes to 1,028,966 for the departing Mayor Livingstone. In a gracious speech Mr Johnson congratulated Mr Livingstone on his achievements in office while promising to build upon them and to win the trust of those who had voted against him.
On the hustings Mr Livingstone had branded Mr Johnson "a joke" in his final campaign pitch to Londoners for a third term as Mayor. But the celebrity Tory challenger dismissed as "a chat show host" and "a buffoon" had the last laugh as he put the icing on the cake of a crushing Conservative performance that finally established party leader David Cameron as a serious contender for the keys to 10 Downing Street come the general election.
Mr Cameron went on a whirlwind tour yesterday to thank voters for the Conservative Party's biggest electoral success since John Major's surprise general election victory in 1992. The Conservatives made crucial advances in the North as well as the South of England while Labour watched once impregnable strongholds in its Welsh heartlands fall. In a near mirror image of Labour's 1995 local election defeat of the Tories ahead of Tony Blair's first landslide in 1997, Cameron's Conservatives won a projected 44% of the popular vote and gained more than 300 seats, while Labour trailed the Liberal Democrats in third place with just 24% of the vote and more than 330 seats lost.
Although he claimed fresh momentum for his party with second place ahead of Labour and some 30 seats gained, recently elected Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg was left treading water with his share of the national vote actually down one point on that achieved last year by former leader Sir Menzies Campbell.