Brash challenger elected London mayor

LONDON – Londoners threw out their liberal two-term mayor Friday in favor of colorful Conservative politician Boris Johnson in an election that handed the nation’s governing Labor Party its worst local elections defeat since the 1960s.

The outcome puts a 43-year-old lawmaker best known for his irreverent jibes and disheveled mop of blond hair at the helm of one of Europe’s pre-eminent cities and host of the 2012 Olympic Games.

“I do not for one minute believe that this election shows that London has been transformed overnight into a Conservative city,” Johnson said. “But I do hope that it does show that the Conservatives have changed into a party that can again be trusted after 30 years with the greatest, most cosmopolitan … city on Earth.”

The voting, a combination of voters’ first and second preferences, gave Johnson 1,168,738 votes, to incumbent Ken Livingstone’s 1,028,966.

Johnson, a former magazine editor and classics scholar, became widely popular across Britain from his humorous appearances on a popular TV news quiz show; he is famous for riding around London on his bicycle while talking on his cell phone.

“Just as I will never vote to ban hunting, so I will never vote to abolish the free-born Englishman’s time-hallowed and immemorial custom, dating back as far as 1990 or so, of cycling while talking on a mobile,” he wrote when a law was proposed banning the practice.

Johnson reined in his mischievous side in a largely subdued campaign in which he called for cracking down on the city’s burgeoning wave of youthful gun and knife crime, scrapping the unpopular articulated buses he calls “18-meter-long socialist frankfurter buses,” and canceling a planned charge of $50 a day for drivers of high-carbon-emissions vehicles entering the central city.

Still, many Londoners are put off by his bumbling, buffoonlike persona.

“He’s like a clown … he’s an absolute joke,” said London resident Jim O’Hagen, 19.

In turning out Livingstone, a fixture in London leftist politics since the 1970s, voters joined a tide across England and Wales that saw the Labor Party lose 331 of more than 3,900 local council seats up for grabs, slipping to third place by receiving just 24 percent of the votes cast, behind the Conservatives, with 44 percent, and the Liberal Democrats, with 25 percent. The remaining votes were split among several smaller parties.

Losing the mayorship of London and its 7.2 million residents to the Conservatives for the first time since the post was created in 2000 was a significant symbolic blow to the ruling party, which analysts said would give the Tories a valuable platform from which to challenge Labor in the next national elections, expected probably in 2010.

The balloting was seen as a dismal referendum on the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose support has ebbed as Britain has slipped toward an economic downturn and voters have grown increasingly anxious over higher costs for housing, food, transport and taxes.