Pat Dollard

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Red Ken’s conservative challenger Boris Johnson was literally dismissed as “a joke” by the media and the Left when he entered the race. Looking a little different today. As the Guardian reported “Asked about the likely result in London, Gordon Brown paid what sounded like a valedictory tribute to Ken Livingstone.”

Video: Prime Minister Brown’s Eulogy For Red Ken

Times Online: Tories Claim Boris Johnson Victory

Telegraph: Boris Poised To Win As Tories Seal Success

BBC: Early results from the election count suggest Conservative candidate Boris Johnson is ahead in the race to become the next mayor of London.

The Guardian: Boris Tipped To Win

Boris Johnson is being strongly tipped to win the London mayoral elections when the results are announced later this afternoon.

The Conservatives are now privately very confident that Johnson, the Henley MP whose candidature was initially dismissed as a joke when it was announced last year, will beat Ken Livingstone.

Boris Johnson

Some Labour figures are also predicting a Johnson a victory. When Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, was asked on GMTV to predict the winner of the mayoral contest, Harman said she “did not expect the London result to be any different from the rest of the country”.

Both parties reported an unusually high turnout in yesterday’s poll, but the Tories are claiming that the large turnout in the pro-Johnson London suburbs was enough to see off the threat posed by Labour getting its vote out in the inner city.

Asked about the likely result in London, Gordon Brown paid what sounded like a valedictory tribute to Livingstone. The prime minister said that he spoke to Livingstone last night and that he had congratulated him on his campaign and thanked him for his work as mayor in areas like securing the Olympics and improving transport.

There were queues at some polling booths as voting closed at 10pm and Labour officials were reporting turnout at general election levels in some inner city seats such as Hackney. In outer London areas such as Edmonton officials ran out of ballot papers.

Labour party workers were insisting overnight that the high turnout in inner London could yet deliver a third term for Livingstone.

“We are not despondent; far from it,” said one Labour official, adding that in one ward there was a 70% turnout.

“The risk message about Boris has got through, and so far as we can see Ken has clawed back eight to 10% in the polls in the course of the campaign.”

However, another official said: “We simply have not had the bodies on the ground or the people available to get the vote out in the outer London area. We have been hit there, but we knew we would be.”

The Tories were reporting that they had met their canvass return projections through west and north-west London.

A Tory spokesman said: “The mayoral contest is far too close to call. There is no scientific evidence. Anecdotal evidence can be wrong. There is no doubt that turnout is high in the doughnut [the outer London boroughs targeted by Johnson]. That does not mean Boris is going to win.”

Another source in the Livingstone camp said: “Harriet was not part of our campaign, so I don’t know if she knows what’s happened. We got our vote out. The turnout in Labour areas was high, in some cases sensationally high. We did not have a Labour collapse and demoralisation.

“With Labour 20 points behind nationally, the very fact that it’s so close in London is an incredible tribute to Ken.”

But Livingstone’s hopes suffered a blow today when the betting firm Paddy Power announced it was going to pay out on a Johnson victory.

Labour’s London campaign chiefs reported that the ethnic-minority vote had turned out for Livingstone, but the white working-class vote had been increasingly hostile to him.

Even the Liberal Democrats reported a high turnout for their candidate, Brian Paddick, in south-west London, the Liberal Democrat stronghold in the capital.

And Livingstone’s campaign received a boost when Simon Hughes, the former Lib Dem mayoral candidate and party president, hinted that his party’s supporters should use their second-preference votes to back Livingstone, after giving their first preferences to Paddick.

“Nobody who has not served London and worked for London deserves to have the votes of Londoners or the top political job in London in the future,” he said.

Turnout in the 2000 mayoralty elections was 34.3% and climbed to 36.95% in 2004.

Senior Labour campaign officials insisted that if Livingstone lost, they did not expect the two-term mayor to blame Brown for his defeat.