Boris Johnson was confirmed as Mayor after the election on Thursday 3 May 2012. This will be his second term. Again he stood against the former Mayor, Ken Livingstone, who he also beat in 2007. Livingstone has now said he will not stand for the post again.

It was a much closer contest than a lot of people were expecting. Boris Johnson is a Conservative, and in the country as a whole the Conservatives have been doing very badly - Labour took over 800 seats from them in local elections on the same day as the London mayoral contest. However, Johnson is popular - more because people find him funny than for anything he has actually done - and was expected to beat the Labour candidate, Livingstone, by quite a wide margin. In fact he only beat him by 3 per cent, after a number of core Labour supporters went out and voted at the last minute.

Boris Johnson will hold the office for the next five years.