Tory Boris elected Mayor of London

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Labour's gloom at suffering its worst council election results for 40 years deepened when Mr Johnson, the colourful Tory MP and journalist, ended the political career of Mr Livingstone after eight years as Mayor.

In a major coup which handed David Cameron a landmark double election victory, Mr Johnson won 1,168,738 votes (53 per cent) to Mr Livingstone's 1,028,966 (47 per cent) after the second preferences of people who backed the other eight candidates were redistributed to the two front-runners.

Mr Johnson won 1,043,761 first-preference votes, Mr Livingstone 893,877. Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate, trailed in third with 236,685.

After the result was declared just before midnight, Mr Johnson paid a generous tribute to Mr Livingstone and hoped London would continue to benefit from his "transparent love" of the city. He said his victory did not mean London was now "a Conservative city" but did mean the party could be trusted again.

An emotional Mr Livingstone said the fault for his defeat was "solely my own". His voice trembling, he said: "You can't be Mayor for eight years and then if you don't win that third term, say it was somebody else's fault."

Labour sources said Mr Johnson had won by piling up a mountain of votes in outer London suburbs in a £1m campaign. Labour could not match the high turn-out of Tory supporters in its inner London strongholds. In Bromley and Bexley alone, the Tory candidate amassed a huge 81,382 majority over Labour, winning by 122,052 votes to 40,670 in the first Mayoral result declared.

Mr Johnson started the race as an outsider with little chance of ending Mr Livingstone's reign at City Hall. Allowing him to become the Tory candidate was seen as a gamble by Mr Cameron after a chequered political career. Now the Tory high command will be keen to ensure Mr Johnson does not make embarrassing mistakes as Mayor, which could put a cloud over Mr Cameron's attempts to portray the Tories as a government-in-waiting. A strong team of experienced advisers is expected to be appointed by the incoming Mayor.

Mr Livingstone's fall from power will send shockwaves through Labour. His ratings were consistently 10 points ahead of his party's national figures – yet he still lost. His defeat highlights the scale of the fight-back Mr Brown needs to give Labour a chance at the next general election.

A battered and bruised Mr Brown is struggling to restore his authority after suffering a humiliating setback in his first elections as Labour leader. In the party's worst council results for 40 years, Labour lost more than 330 seats in local elections on May Day, finishing third with a 24 per cent projected share of the vote behind the Liberal Democrats (25 per cent) and the Conservatives (44 per cent).

Less than a year after he succeeded Tony Blair with high hopes of enhancing Labour's electoral appeal, Mr Brown had to promise to listen to the unmistakable message from the voters who had rejected his party.

Mr Brown conceded that the local results were "disappointing". Speaking in Downing Street, he said: "My job is to listen and to lead. We will learn lessons, we will reflect on what has happened and then we will move forward."

Mr Brown pledged to steer the country through difficult economic times and prepare for the prosperity that would follow. "The test of leadership is not what happens in a period of success but what happens in difficult circumstances," he said. He said he needed to show "strength and resolution as well as the conviction and ideas to take the country forward".

Tessa Jowell, the Minister for London, conceded that the voters had given Labour "a pasting". She said the Government had to conduct a conversation with ordinary people rather than inside "the Westminster village".

Labour's heavy losses exceeded the party's worst nightmares. Officials had predicted the loss of only 200 seats because many of those contested were last fought in 2004, when Labour did poorly and won 26 per cent of the vote amid a backlash over the Iraq war. In the event, Labour did even worse on Thursday.

The huge 20-point gap between the two main parties sparked comparisons with similar results at the 1995 local elections. Two years later, John Major lost the general election.

Derek Wyatt, the Labour MP for Sittingbourne, ominously called the results Mr Brown's "John Major moment". He said: "Gordon has committed spectacular own goals and the public is punishing him for it." He added: "We have to clear the crap out of the Cabinet ... He has until the conference season [this autumn] and, if he is still 24 per cent down in the polls, the party will have to take some pretty brave decisions."

There was unanimity among Labour MPs that Mr Brown's decision to abolish the 10p-in-the-pound lower rate of income tax proved an electoral disaster. Labour's vote dropped in many of the party's working-class strongholds as people rebelled over a change which hit 5.3 million low-paid workers.

As ministers rallied round, there was no immediate threat to Mr Brown's position. But the Labour MP Ian Gibson, a Brown ally, suggested the leadership issue might be reopened before the general election if Mr Brown failed to mount a successful fightback. "I'll give him six months to do it or there will be really hard talking," he said.

After his first electoral test as Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg said his party had "regained momentum" by gaining 30 councillors, even though its projected national share of the vote was four points down on 2004. "We have confounded the critics ... and gone forwards rather than backwards," he said. He described Labour as "a government that has run out of steam that is in power and nobody knows why, that has lost touch with ordinary British families".

Why all may not be lost ...

1968

The Beatles may have been singing "You say you want a revolution, well, you know we all want to change the world", but the British electorate did not want a changed world at all. They wanted to go back to the way things used to be. In London, the Conservatives picked up over 60 per cent of the vote, compared with Labour's 28.5 per cent, which meant that Labour lost all but four of London's 32 boroughs. The outcome was a harbinger of the 1970 general election result.

1981

An example of how misleading local election results can be. Labour did very well, seizing control of the Greater London Council and Liverpool among other prizes, taking every seat but one in Islington. The way that they ran these councils caused so much controversy that the party might have been better off nationally without them. The general election two years later was the worst for Labour since the 1930s.

1990

The Conservative Party chairman, Kenneth Baker, cleverly outspun Labour by pretending to believe that the real electoral tests were whether the Tories could hold on to Bradford, Westminster and Wandsworth. When they held the two London boroughs, the result was interpreted as a defeat for Neil Kinnock, pictured. However, Tory MPs in marginal seats knew the results were bad, which is why they removed Margaret Thatcher from office six months later.

1995

This was the slaughter of the Conservatives. They lost nearly 2,000 seats, and were left in control of almost no councils of any size apart from some London boroughs and Buckinghamshire council. There were numerous major cities in the north of England, including Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle with no Tory councillors at all. This heralded the 1997 general election defeat. But there was an up side for the Tories: their results were so bad that they have made gains in every council election since.

2004

This week's elections were not the first in which Labour fell behind the Liberal Democrats. They hit what was then a historic low in 2004, because of the unpopularity of the Iraq war and student fees, losing control of councils in areas seen as Labour's heartlands, such as Newcastle, Leeds and Doncaster. This did not stop Tony Blair leading Labour to general election victory the following year.