The May Day massacre | Video: London's verdict on Boris

It was shortly before midnight on Friday and Boris Johnson’s children were up well past their bedtime. However, this was a moment none of them will forget.

The grey-faced returning officer Anthony Mayer was about to read out the results of the London mayoral election in City Hall on the south bank of the Thames.

Lara, the eldest daughter of the Tory candidate, turned to her younger siblings Cassia, Milo and Theo, who were all sitting in the front row of the audience, two of them wearing blue “Back Boris” badges. She whispered to them to keep their fingers crossed for Daddy. They did as they were told.

Westminster’s pundits were predicting a comfortable victory for Johnson, but his children were taking no chances.

Then, after painstakingly reading out the first-preference votes received by all 10 mayoral candidates, Mayer announced the final result. Johnson had indeed beaten Ken Livingstone, Labour’s two-term incumbent, a man who only months ago had been regarded as undefeatable and who had consistently polled 10 percentage points better than the Labour party nationally.

The margin was 43% to 37%. Johnson was ahead of Livingstone by a full 140,000 votes after second preferences were taken into account.

His victory speech was gentle and gracious. It promised to heal the wounds of a divided city, a conscious aping of Margaret Thatcher’s “harmony and discord” remarks on the steps of No 10 when she became prime minister in 1979.

He praised Londoners, promising to “earn their trust and dispel some of the myths that have been created about me”.

The 43-year-old Old Etonian, famed for his colourful gaffes and occasionally exotic personal life, admitted many voters might have hovered “a little before putting an X in my box”.

“Let’s get cracking tomorrow,” he concluded. “And let’s have a drink tonight.”

And, oh boy, what a drink it was. After a flurry of television interviews, Johnson was driven upriver to the Tories’ celebration party in the Altitude bar on the 29th floor of Millbank Tower in Westminster.

The party was in full swing long before he arrived. Tory grandees, campaigners, friends and family began pouring into the low-lit room about 6pm, and, with mounting evidence that Johnson had pulled it off, the champagne was flowing.

Party donors spared no expense on the lavish bash – with a grand ice sculpture of the Back Boris campaign as the centrepiece, an all-blonde girl band dressed in black ball dresses, and unlimited oysters and caviar.

As a bashful-looking Johnson strolled into the room with his entourage, to clapping and cheering, there was laughter as the band struck up Jerusalem.

In a brief speech, Johnson paid tribute to his campaign team, and to David Cameron. The Tory leader returned the favour. “There were no quips, even though everyone was elated,” said one who was present. “Both the speeches were serious and straight, with Boris acknowledging Cameron’s role in the night’s suc-cesses, and vice versa.”

Among the revellers were Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lyricist; Lord Marland, the former Tory party treasurer; Johnson’s mother and father, and his children. The party continued until dawn.

It was an exuberant finale to an extraordinary few days, which had seen the Tories transformed from plucky underdogs to a potential government in waiting.

Elections in English and Welsh local councils saw Labour fall to 24%, its lowest share of the popular vote since the 1960s. The Tories stormed to victory not just in the south but also through the Midlands and the north of England, gaining 44% of the vote and more than 250 council seats.

Gordon Brown and his aides have been left reeling, hoping vainly that some kind of “relaunch” can get Labour back on track. His backbench-ers remain stunned, most of them unable to consider regicide, but left muttering warnings that the prime minister has until the autumn to prove himself.

They are left wondering how the Tories and Team Boris pulled off such a historic victory? Why did Labour’s support implode? And is this reversal in fortune a blip or a key moment that will see them cast out of office at the next general election? THE Tory campaign to recapture London after 30 years of Labour control was a microcosm of their energetic push across the country, and gives hints of how they will approach the next general election.

Team Boris was still pounding the streets of London long after dark on Thursday night. The final push was so intense that areas targeted by the activists reached saturation point – they were running out of doors to knock on.

Not until Big Ben struck 10pm, and the polls officially closed, did the army of staff and volunteers finally accept that the result was out of their hands.

An hour later, the exhausted campaigners descended on a bar in Chinatown, where a dishevelled Johnson, who had been on the go since dawn, held court. His impromptu speech was uncharacteristically short and philosophical – he thanked everyone who had worked so hard on his behalf and urged them to let their hair down, as there was nothing more they could do now.

“We took him at his word and got plastered,” according to one senior activist. “I left at around 1.30am, absolutely knackered.”

Little wonder Johnson’s team was ready to drop. With the Australian election guru Lynton Crosby at the helm, the 20 or so paid staff and 20 volunteers have endured a gruelling schedule in their quest to get their man elected.

The formidable Crosby was drafted in after Christmas, when the Johnson campaign appeared to be going nowhere. His four months of work cost the Tories £140,000 – but his decades of election-fighting experience down under proved well worth the money, turning Johnson from an entertaining outsider into a winner.

Even Livingstone admitted the Conservatives ran a “superior” operation, changing their man’s public image from bum-bling, floppy-haired toff to a sober political operator, and pouring money and resources into meticulously targeted areas of the capital.

Under Crosby, the entire team met at 8am, seven days a week – with senior staff at their desks long before. “Lynton brought total discipline to the campaign,” a strategist said. “Volunteers were treated exactly the same as staff. Anyone who wasn’t there at 8am on the dot would get a phone call from his deputy, asking why they weren’t there.”

Crosby prides himself as a workaholic and election obsessive, once joking when asked if he had met the Queen that there was “no point” because Her Majesty “doesn’t vote and she doesn’t live in one of our target seats”.

From the day he took charge, Crosby ensured Johnson – notorious for his loose tongue – was kept on an almost stran-gulatingly tight leash. All requests for interviews with potentially dangerous journalists were declined, for fear Johnson would be tempted into saying something disastrous.

For his press team, Katie Perrior and her sidekick Jo Tanner, the most innocuous situations could pose alarming risks – such as the time Johnson was unexpectedly subjected to an inane “health and safety” lecture from a hotel manager as he prepared to give an interview. The old Boris would not have been able to resist a colourful and politically incorrect outburst. Under the stern glare of his PR people, the new Boris kept his mouth zipped.

Surprisingly, according to insiders, Johnson did not resent being censored. A Tory close to the new mayor said: “I know for a fact that, initially, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t say what he thought. He didn’t see what was wrong with speaking his mind on certain things. However, Lynton told him in no uncertain terms he could not do that. Lynton stopped Boris being Boris, and Boris agreed to go with the flow. And it worked.”

Asked about this apparent gagging of the “old Boris” in an interview conducted shortly after victory was announced, Johnson saw no inconsistency. “I was elected as new Boris and I will govern as new Boris, or whatever the phrase is,” he said, playing on Tony Blair’s oft-quoted soundbite about new Labour.

Crosby and his team were never under any illusion that the public schoolboy could win over large swathes of London’s tough white council estates and ethnic minority communities.

Instead, they adopted a twofold approach aimed at maximising turn-out in Tory-leaning areas.

In a so-called “doughnut” approach, activists focused relentlessly on the outer boroughs of London, where voters have previously failed to show much interest or enthusiasm in who the mayor is and what he or she does. Johnson’s campaign team also poured people into blue boroughs such as Putney and Fulham, in an effort to bring out their core vote. A prime area targeted with spectacular success was Bexley and Bromley – where four times as many voters turned out for Johnson as for Livingstone.

James Cleverly, now a Tory member of the London assembly for the area, said: “I got through three sets of clothes on Thursday. We were doing a dawn raid, a silent leaflet drop at 5 o’clock on Thursday and I got drenched. I changed, voted, got soaked, changed, got soaked. It has been brilliant.

“We did everything we could, we won’t look back and think we could have done more. It’s been an amazing organised campaign – Boris’s team have been so well plugged in. We had teams up from Maidstone, Folkestone and Hythe . . . all over Kent. My agent isn’t a poetic man, but he said, ‘These aren’t ripples, this is a disastrous undercurrent’ and he is right.”

Crosby is unlikely to hang around Conservative central office – or London – now his job’s done. “Lynton comes in, runs a campaign, and gets out again,” a colleague said.

Yesterday, tributes from grateful Tory grandees were pouring in. The suave Marland said: “We had the best manager in the world . . . He had a very electable candidate who resonated with the public. The electorate has had enough of Labour.” THIS was indeed the experience of Labour activists, both in London and around the country. In the final days of their campaign, Team Livingstone was engulfed in a mood of gloom. When Livingstone, in his final interviews, spoke about his plans to write a book and have a “big drink” should he lose the vote, this was not some calculated attempt to manage expectations. The Labour mayor and his team had a sense the game was up.

The call centres charged with ringing potential Labour voters at home were greeted with shouting and swearing. Even calls to parts of London strongholds, such as Brent and Hackney, received a hostile response.

Johnson’s team, which had been tipped off that the call centre staff were slandering their candidate, placed a mole inside Livingstone’s campaign team.

“It was not a happy place,” said the interloper, who spent more than a week working shoulder to shoulder with Labour volunteers. “Some of the people were very surprised to be getting a call about having previously voted Labour as it was such a long time ago. Many were just putting the phone down.”

Just as the Tories suspected, the Labour volunteers were instructed to “go negative” on Johnson. One of the call centre scripts, seen by The Sunday Times, played up the BNP’s support for Johnson as a second-preference vote.

Despite regular visits from Livingstone and Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, morale among call-centre volunteers grew worse and worse. Scenting defeat in the last few days, many volunteers simply failed to turn up. At the start of one shift in Labour’s HQ last Wednesday, only three of 30 phones were manned. An hour into the shift that had risen to eight.

The bleak mood was replicated among Labour footsol-diers outside the capital. John Denham, the universities secretary, spoke about the crisis of “southern discomfort” after his council in Southampton was captured by the Tories.

Comments from voters in Southampton city centre captured the angry mood. Graham Blake, 64, who last week voted Conservative having voted Labour at every election previously, said: “My trust in Labour, and Gordon Brown in particular, is going downhill pretty fast. If he is going to lead the country he needs to lead by example. I could never stand Margaret Thatcher but at least she made a decision and stood by it.”

Peter Allsworth, a 61-year-old shop assistant, said: “I remember the days when Labour was backed by the unions and their politicians supported the ordinary working man – no more.”

It was a similar scene in Bury, Lancashire, which also turned blue on Thursday. There, voters were refusing to swallow the official Labour line that the rising cost of living was caused by global economic turmoil.

Rachel Atkinson, 28, a trainee physiotherapist, said: “I’ve only got a little [Ford] Fiesta but it costs over £40 to fill it up. When you add that up over a month it’s a lot of money. I know Gordon Brown will say it’s because of the global economy, but the simple fact is 70% of that is tax.

“It’s not just the cost of everything, though. The government just seems to be plodding along, they don’t seem to have any answers. I voted for Tony Blair at the last election but I doubt I’ll vote Labour again.”

FOR Brown such sentiments suggest that the elections should be seen not as a melt-down but as an evaporation of support, as some Labour insiders are calling it.

Furious backbench MPs this weekend blamed drift at the top – and in particular the dithering over the abolition of the 10p starting rate of tax – for the scale of the defeat. They are wondering whether a turning point has been reached where Labour cannot now defeat the Conservatives unless there is change at No 10.

Brown has now in effect been put on probation. He has until the party conference to demonstrate that he has listened to the criticism of his performance and learnt from his mistakes, otherwise a leadership challenge will become a real threat.

Greg Pope, MP for Hynd-burn and a former whip, summed up the mood among the parliamentary party. “This is not the time for Labour MPs to destabilise the leadership, but Gordon is going to have to get his act together, otherwise things could be very different by the autumn,” he said.

Bob Marshall-Andrews, the maverick MP for marginal Med-way, went much further – saying Labour was finished, whatever Brown or the party now does.

“Well, we were smashed. The only thing we’re clinging onto now is the chance that ‘events, dear boy, events’ might just give Gordon the platform he needs to shine,” he said. “It is a rather desperate state of affairs to be clinging to the possibility of some cataclysmic crisis to rescue the party’s fortunes. I think we’re resigned to a Tory victory at the next election.”

In a sign of the continued collapse in the prime minister’s authority, even ministers were delivering thinly veiled barbs at Brown. “This is one big wake-up call to Westminster team Labour. Too often we speak as if we are in a new elite. We are not sufficiently in touch,” said Ivan Lewis, the health minister and MP for Bury South.

There was also anger at the inexperienced advisers and young cabinet ministers who form Brown’s tight-knit inner circle. Denis MacShane, the Rotherham MP and another former minister, said: “We see too many members of the cabinet who have never experienced defeat in any election. All they know is the triumphant years of the Blair-Brown partnership.”

MacShane was too polite to name the “youths” who have been misadvising the leadership, but other MPs are privately fiercely critical of Doug-las Alexander, 40, the international development secretary, and Ed Balls, 41, the schools secretary.

Left-wing MP John McDon-nell tried unsuccessfully to mount a challenge to Brown’s “coronation” last year, failing to gain enough support from MPs to secure a place on the party ballot. In the wake of Thursday’s defeat he has offered to stand again as a “stalking horse” candidate.

“The coalition that brought us in in 1997 has been alienated – the public sector, pensioners, students, as a result we’ve been decimated,” said the Hayes and Harlington MP. “We need a radical change in direction, or else we’re sleepwalking into a Tory government. I want there to be a change of leadership.”

On Tuesday, when MPs return to the Commons from the bank holiday break, all eyes will be on Jon Cruddas, the popular member for Dagenham who narrowly lost last year’s deputy leadership contest. His friends hope he will use a rally of the left-wing Compass group to indicate he is ready to make a challenge of his own.

There is little evidence, however, that many MPs would welcome the further trauma of a leadership challenge that could easily descend into civil war. A far more likely scenario is that it will be Brown who will wield the knife in the form of a cabinet reshuffle. The earliest opportunity is the bank holiday weekend at the end of this month.

Aides are pulling the prime minister in conflicting directions. Some want him to promote the “wise heads” – Jack Straw, the 61-year-old justice secretary, and Alan Johnson, 57, the health secretary. Others say his cabinet needs a stronger injection of youth. Which way the prime minister jumps – or if he jumps at all – remains to be seen.

Following the electoral drubbing Brown’s party machine is in a state of almost total collapse. On Friday morning David Pitt Watson, who was the prime minister’s choice to become the next Labour general secretary, announced he would no longer be taking the job, citing “contractual” problems in leaving his old job as a City fund manager.

Labour’s financial backers are equally downcast, threatening the party’s ability to fund the next general election. Sir Gulam Noon, the Indian ready meals entrepreneur and long-time party donor, said the prime minister needed to “rediscover himself”.

“It’s a bad result there is no doubt about it,” he said. “I know that the Labour party is under the weather but I never expected this kind of result. In business, if something like this happens we just revamp it, rediscover something.

“There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the Labour party but they will have to put their thinking cap on. Gordon Brown has to rediscover himself. He has to do something. In real life nothing happens automatically – you have to make it happen.”

Brown was this weekend putting the finishing touches to yet another “relaunch” aimed at wresting back the initiative from the Tories. However, a few eye-catching initiatives will not be enough to change the political weather. AS Labour grandees ponder the prospect of losing national office for the first time in more than a decade, Tories will be considering the rare pleasure of assuming significant political power.

On Friday morning, Johnson’s kitchen cabinet convened at the offices they had hired at County Hall, just over the Thames from the parliament. Around the table were Crosby and his deputy and fellow Australian, James McGrath; Dan Rit-terband – Johnson’s chief of staff – and Perrior and Tanner. All those at the meeting – with the possible exception of Crosby and McGrath – are expected to keep their jobs in a Johnson administration.

McGrath, a seasoned Tory strategist in his thirties, played a vital role in Johnson’s victory, and is understood to be weighing up whether to return to Conservative central office to work on the next general election campaign; throw himself straight into the crucial Crewe and Nantwich by-election this month; or take a break.

A senior Tory said: “James operates under the radar, but he was the guy who really made things work. He was the fixer, who ensured, on a day-to-day basis, that Boris was in the right place at the right time, doing what he should be doing, and more importantly, being seen to do so.”

A key role in Johnson’s administration will go to Nick Boles, a fiercely intellectual founding member of the so-called Notting Hill set and wan-nabe MP. He will act as a “tran-sition manager”, an idea borrowed from the US, recruiting “big hitters” to important jobs at City Hall. His work should be complete by the autumn, when he wants to be free to concentrate on his own election campaign.

Johnson will run London through a “collegiate” cabinet-style government with six or more deputies responsible for different policy areas. The style of government, similar to that used by Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, the former and current mayor of New York, will see deputies responsible for crime, transport and other key policy areas. A source close to the Johnson camp said yesterday: “The idea is to spread the load and get some real expertise focusing on key areas.”

Insiders say his strategists have been focusing almost exclusively on his first two weeks in power. “We figure that people will lose interest after that,” said one. “The spotlight will be on for the first few days, so we have to get it right.”

A blizzard of initiatives will be announced, including a ban on alcohol on the Tube; the announcement of a highly paid FTSE 250 chief executive to “run London”, and a raft of redundancies in the Greater London Authority, the body responsible for the strategic administration of London.

First to go are expected to be Livingstone’s flagship string of overseas offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Delhi, Mumbai and Brussels – regarded by Johnson as grotesque symbols of empire building.

SHORTLY after midnight yesterday, shaky internet footage was put out on the Conservative website showing Cameron’s exultant reaction to Johnson’s victory. “Brilliant, fantastic, well done,” Cameron said. “That was so drawn-out.”

He was right to celebrate – but the victory is likely to bring more than a few headaches for the Tory leader.

Thursday’s result means that for the first time, voters, the media and political rivals regard prime minister Cameron as a serious prospect. He will now be scrutinised more carefully as a future national leader, not just as an opposition politician with a good ear for soundbites. While Cameron has proved adept in capturing the public mood, his party still has few concrete policies on the meaty issues of taxation and public services.

Indeed some Labour optimists see their defeat as an opportunity. “We are now into a new phase,” Balls said on Friday. “It’s quite like how it was in the run-up to the 1997 election when we were asked as an opposition, day by day, our policies: did they add up? Did they make sense?”

Eric Pickles, the Tories’ bluff election campaign manager, was suitably humble on Friday morning. He said: “We’ve had a decade when nobody has taken us that seriously and what David Cameron has done has put us into a position where the public wants to hear what we have to say.

“We were in a position where the public were in auto-reject – they weren’t prepared to listen to us. We’re now in the best position we’ve been in for a long time and that gives us an opportunity to explain.”

While Cameron and Johnson share an Eton and Oxford education, there is no guarantee their relationship will continue to be so easygoing. During the mayoral campaign Cameron supervised things from a distance through George Osborne, the shadow chancellor.

Now, however, Johnson will be less ready to take orders from his party leader. “The dynamics will be different. Boris is now the second or third most powerful politician in the country, whereas Cameron would not even feature in the top 10,” said a senior member of Johnson’s team.

Cameron will see things differently. “This was a victory for Team Cameron and vindication of his entire approach,” said a leading ally.

Brown and Labour will now focus all their fire on the new mayor. Cameron, for his part, knows that his prospects in the next election now rest on the shoulders of a London mayor who, “new Boris” or not, could foul things up very quickly indeed with a slip of the tongue.

Yesterday afternoon Johnson signed the official acceptance of office at City Hall and, as he stood up to make a speech, tripped on a step and nearly fell over. He then got in a muddle about which architectural peer, Rogers or Foster, had designed the building and declared that there were probably “shredding machines puffing and panting away in various parts of the building – and quite right too”. Old Boris might return sooner than anybody expected.

Additional reporting: Holly Watt, Robert Watts and Anna Mikhailova

How bad was that?

■ Labour’s showing in last week’s local elections, a share of the vote of just 24%, was the weakest recorded by any of the two main parties in electoral history, writes David Smith. Though long-run comparisons are diffi cult because of changes in the structure of local government, Labour’s showing was worse than Harold Wilson’s 1968 result when the party achieved less than 30% of votes in county council elections

■ After the 1968 drubbing, brought about by a wave of public anger over the 1967 devaluation of the pound and tough economic austerity measures, Wilson recovered to be favourite to win the 1970 election. He lost to Sir Edward Heath’s Tories

■ Big defeats are recoverable. Margaret Thatcher’s heavy local election losses in 1981 appeared to signal that she was a one-term prime minister. With Britain in the throes of the deepest recession in the postwar period, her ratings reached their nadir after Sir Geoffrey Howe’s austerity budget of 1981. Civil war in the Labour party and victory in the Falklands war propelled her to a decisive victory in 1983

■ The closest parallel to last week’s results was John Major, left, in 1995 who recorded a 25% share. Though the economy was growing, house prices were falling and voters still felt the scars from the recession. Major led a divided party, its reputation at rock bottom because of fi nancial and sexual sleaze. Two years later the Tories succumbed to a landslide defeat

Like father...

He’s got a mop of blond hair, can’t resist a joke and is an outrageous charmer. Yep, it’s Boris Johnson’s dad.

Asked yesterday if his son was serious about being mayor, Stanley replied: “He gave up drink for three months. If you give up drink for three months, you’ve got to be serious.”

Quizzed on whether his son’s education would help him understand the needs of Londoners, he said: “He speaks Latin and ancient Greek. What a classical education teaches you is to think, to understand, to express yourself.”

This man is obviously good value. Somebody should give him a job. Ah, the Tories are reportedly considering him as a replacement for his son as Henley MP.

Voter’s view

Gareth Morgan, 46, voted Tory in the Vale of Glamorgan, a key gain for the party in Wales. The fireman said: “I don’t have a party I stick to and always vote for; it generally depends on how good I feel the candidates are.

“I’m not very happy with Labour’s policies. It isn’t just because of Gordon Brown – but he certainly isn’t doing himself any favours.

“I’m not completely decided who I will vote for in the general election but it will probably be David Cameron.”

Voter’s view

Claire Lowery, 35, a recruitment consultant from Monkseaton in North Tyneside, voted Conservative as the council moved into the party’s hands from no overall control.

“The credit crunch was the biggest issue for me,” she said. “With prices of petrol and food rising so sharply, the basic cost of living is so high. The future looks bleak with a Labour government.”

She added that local issues had affected her vote. “The Labour mayor has done nothing good for the area.”

Times Recommends

• Olympic-size television coming to your town
• Mosley opens new front in battle for privacy
• Decorator fined for smoking in van