At City Hall, late on Friday the 2^nd of May, as a wearied and nonplussed looking Ken Livingstone watched on, Boris Johnson delivered a victory speech sopping with his own peculiar brand of loathsome Tory smugness.

The realisation was dawning for the million or so people who backed Ken that Boris had actually won.

It was a shame, really, that the campaigning had to end. Not just because it ended in such a calamity, but because those of us who knew we’d vote against him didn’t really mind Boris being a part of the whole thing. Jabbering senselessly, thrusting and chopping spasmodically with his arms, he and Brian Paddick - the stooge - perfectly complemented Ken’s astuteness and droopy-eyed wit. They were like an unknowing political pastiche of the Marx Brothers, and it was okay to laugh at Boris’s winsome blockheadedness because we didn’t think he would actually win.

But he did; there was a collective gulp of foreboding among that million or so, and we all began to wonder how it happened.

Much was made of Boris’s ability to be so callously offensive to almost every minority cultural group he mentions, as in the infamous article where he referred to black people as ‘picaninnies’ and their ‘watermelon smiles’. It’s unfortunate, though, that the press and his opponents challenged him on the word ‘piccaninnies’ alone. More broadly, his articles are rife with prejudicial classist arrogance. Beneath the disdain for whichever social substratum came under fire from his journalistic blunderbuss - be it Africans, Islam or the gay community - is an archaic set of values completely at odds with modern London. But for all the cries of the million or so who saw this as a clear sign of his ineptitude to govern this city, who caught a whiff of hypocrisy about his supposed reverence for multicultural London, evidently more people just didn’t mind that much.

Who were the other, slightly larger million or so, who hopped gleefully on to Boris’s blithesome Routemaster? They were the massive Tory majorities in the plusher areas of central London and in what has become known, rather gratifyingly, as the suburban ‘doughnut’; where people are fearful of the crime that pervades low-income areas but not their own; where there isn’t the cultural heterogeneity for Boris’s divisiveness to cause division. (There were, too, a depressingly large number of votes for him in low-income areas: the sad enigma of the working class Tory, into whose faces Boris will duly let rip the foul guff of perfidy).

So what do we have to look forward to? Boris promised extensions to student travelcard discounts, though they’ll probably be matched by price increases to pay for the Routemasters. New plans to ban alcohol on tubes and buses might be difficult to enforce when they come in next month. (No doubt Tories would call that the ‘nanny state’ if it was Ken’s idea). And who knows, stopping kids littering in ‘respect schools’ might make them stop killing each other. We’ll have to wait and see whether Tory insidiousness or Boris’s own personal buffoonery will hurt London, but Ken voters reserve the right to say ‘I told you so’.

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Boris Johnson, London Mayor, Politics