“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-metre-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.

Johnson said he would move to allay voters’ concerns. “I know there will be many whose pencils hovered for an instant before putting an X in my box,” he said. “I will work flat out to regain and to justify your confidence.”

In turning out Livingstone, a fixture in London leftist politics since the 1970s, voters joined a tide across England and Wales that saw the Labour 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.

... contd.