London  - His booming voice and mop of blond hair make Boris Johnson, known to most Londoners as Boris, instantly recognizable.

The posh accent and privileged background of the Oxford-trained classics scholar are in stark contrast to the left-wing credentials attributed to Ken Livingstone, the working class Labour mayor he ousted in Thursday's election.

Johnson, 43, a Conservative member of parliament and controversial former news magazine editor, knows that he will be judged from now on more by his political skills than by the quick wit he displays on satirical talk shows and in newspaper columns.

"I have never been so serious about anything in my life," Johnson said about the prospect of his new job.

An eccentric prone to gaffes, he won the hearts of Londoners with a short-and-sharp campaign in which he promised to cut bureaucracy and focus on the fight against drugs and crime, while improving transport and housing.

"It seems incredible to me that we can design a mobile phone the size of a credit card and yet we cannot produce a system of air conditioning small enough to fit on the Tube network," he said.

Himself a cyclist, Johnson has pledged to become a the city's "greenest" mayor by building more cycling lanes and promoting public transport.

He has pledged to "amend" - but not abolish - the much-despised congestion charge scheme and pledged to bring back a modernized version of the open-platform Routemaster buses phased out by Livingstone.

But many of the 7 million Londoners will watch Johnson closely for how he, as a Conservative and an "establishment" figure, will handle delicate issues of race, crime and drugs in a city as ethnically and culturally diverse as London.

In previous articles for the right-of-centre Spectator, Johnson has been critical of Islam, raised concerns about uncontrolled immigration and described African children as "piccaninnies" - a term for which he has since apologized.

Johnson, a former editor of the Spectator, and journalist on the Times and the Daily Telegraph, was born in New York on June 19, 1964.

He was educated at Eton College and read classics at Oxford, where he was president of the Oxford Union.

Johnson is married to Marina Wheeler, the half-Indian daughter of veteran BBC newsman Charles Wheeler, with whom he has four children. (dpa)