The Conservative candidate won by a margin of almost 140,000 votes, polling 53 per cent to Ken Livingstone's 47 per cent.

 

Johnson's four-year term will take him up to the eve of the Olympics.

 

The next election is scheduled to take place just a few weeks before the Olympics open on July 27, 2012.

 

Johnson is expected to appoint Kate Hoey, the former Sports Minister and Labour MP for Vauxhall, as his special advisor on the Olympics.

 

Johnson will also be given a place on the influential Board that is overseeing preparations for the 2012 Games.

 

It leaves Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell, who helped run Livingstone's campaign during the election, as politically isolated.

 

The other members include Sebastian Coe,the chairman of London 2012 who is a former Conservative MP, and Colin Moynihan, the chairman of the British Olympic Association and a Tory Peer.

 

During the campaign Jowell claimed Johnson's "policies for London are not serious."

 

Coe, though, insisted on the eve of the election that the election of Johnson would not disrupt the build-up to the Games.

 

He told insidethegames: "We can keep with anyone.

 

"For the Olympics we have adopted a position of political neturality and we shall continue to follow that path."

 

But  series of high-profile gaffes and his relative lack of frontline experience have left doubts about his ability to govern London, particularly in the run-up to the 2012 Games.

 

As Mayor, he will be expected to attend at least part of the Beijing Olympics, probably even taking part in the Closing Ceremony where he will accept the Olympic flag from his Chinese counter-part, and his party will hope he is able to avoid offending the hosts.

 

“Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase,” Johnson wrote in one of his books.

 

Johnson, 43, who is usually known simply as "Boris", has the pedigree for high political office - he was educated at the elite Eton College school and Oxford University, where he read Classics.

 

Johnson has had to apologise repeatedly for perceived offensive remarks, while his most senior previous jobs were editing the right-wing Spectator magazine and acting as Conservative spokesman on higher education.

 

His accusation in 2004 that the people of Liverpool were wallowing in "victim status" after hostage Ken Bigley was killed in Iraq saw him forced to take a penitential trip to city to say "sorry" in person.

 

He was dismissed not long after from the Conservatives' front-bench team for misleading then party leader Michael Howard about an extra-marital affair.

 

Comments in 2006 linking Papua New Guinea to "cannibalism and chief-killing" when describing a decade of infighting in the Tory party led to protests from the Pacific island state's diplomats.

 

Johnson promised to "add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology".

 

Meanwhile, London's black MPs, anti-racism campaigners, his Mayoral challengers and a left-wing thinktank condemned his description in a 2002 newspaper article of black people as "piccaninies" with "water melon smiles".

 

The self-styled "one-man melting pot" - his great-grandfather was briefly interior minister in the last Ottoman Turk government and he claims French, German and Russian heritage -- apologised but said he was taken out of context.

 

Elsewhere, there has also been controversy over his links to Darius Guppy, an old schoolfriend who was convicted of fraud - and also reportedly roped Johnson into a plan to beat up a journalist.

 

But Johnson - a close friend of current Tory leader David Cameron since Oxford and a fellow member of the raucous, upper class Bullingdon Club student drinking society - bounced back during the knife-edge campaign.

 

His campaign targeted voters on the outskirts of London who have been alienated in previous mayoral elections by the focus on inner-city issues -- the "doughnut" strategy.

 

He ran on a platform of notably phasing out so-called "bendy buses" and reintroduce the hop-on, hop-off red Routmasters as well as reform Livingstone's controversial congestion charge road pricing scheme.

 

Johnson also has a strong following among some young people, thanks in part to appearances on top-rating quiz show "Have I Got News For You?" and underlined by his support on social networking website Facebook.