Livingstone heads for win

Ken Livingstone is heading for a wafer-thin victory over Steve Norris in the Mayor of London election, latest polls suggest today.

A YouGov survey for Sky News predicted Mr Livingstone was on course to beat his Tory rival by 53 per cent to 47 per cent in a final run-off. A separate MORI/ITV poll found a similar winning margin of 54 per cent to 46 per cent.

But although the online and phone polls pointed to another four years of Livingstone rule, both Labour and the Conservatives conceded the race was too close to call.

Even if Mr Livingstone won the mayoral race, he was facing much stronger opposition in the London Assembly.

With Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes on course to come third, his supporters' second preferences were likely to be decisive. Mr Norris would need a large majority of Lib-Dem as well as UK Independence Party votes to snatch victory.

For his part, Mr Livingstone was hoping that Green Party and anti-war Respect voters would be so scared of a Tory triumph that they would have opted to make him their second choice.

The YouGov poll put Mr Livingstone on 35 per cent, Mr Norris on 31 per cent, Mr Hughes on 18 per cent and others on a total of 16 per cent.

But after second preferences, the survey gave the Mayor a final lead of just six points.

They come into play if no candidate gets more than 50 per cent of first choice ballots.

MORI's telephone poll of 3,700 Londoners for ITV put Mr Norris eight points behind in the final run-off.

Meanwhile the little-known Assembly would suddenly become powerful as the Mayor would not be guaranteed the nine votes to safeguard his budget and other plans.

A victory for Mr Livingstone would give a much-needed boost to Tony Blair on a night of bad election results, and justify the Prime Minister's controversial decision to readmitthe former GLC leader to the Labour Party earlier this year. Although the Mayor's move to rejoin the party was expected to cost him support, it may turn out that his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq has helped him scrape home.

But if Mr Livingstone has lost City Hall, the result would be certain to spark widespread calls for the Prime Minister to make way for Gordon Brown.

Overnight, Mr Livingstone predicted the result would be "very tight indeed". He said: "Supporters of Simon Hughes (Liberal Democrats), Darren Johnson (Greens) and the minor parties have a choice between broadly pro-environment transport policies and those of Steve Norris."

The mood at the London Labour Party's HQ in Old Queen Street was tense amid fears that Mr Livingstone was in real trouble and the party would lose a large slice of its share of the vote in the Assembly.

"We always said it would be closer than the polls predicted but nobody believed us. They said we were just trying to scare the Labour vote to boost turnout but we really meant it," one aide said.

Mr Norris's camp was buoyant, with some aides even predicting their candidate would be "some way ahead". The former minister even shrugged off his laid-back image to personally phone hundreds of Tory supporters yesterday until the polls closed at 10pm.

He was at Conservative Central Office to help out its General Election Volunteer Agency, known as Geneva, to ring round "soft" Conservative voters across the capital.

Although his campaign was officially merely "quietly confident", he later went for a celebratory dinner with party workers to thank them for their help over the gruelling sixmonth effort

For the Lib-Dems, Mr Hughes insisted he was still very much in the race. But privately his party admitted that they had failed to get into the all-important top two places in the mayoral race.

A low turnout, which many expected to be just a third of the

5.2 million people eligible to vote, could also be a deciding factor.

In the last London election there was just a 33.5 per cent turnout and the parties predicted it could drop to 30 per cent.

This is despite the fact that many more postal votes have been submitted this year in London - although it is not an all postal-vote region like those in the North. The Conservatives believe that they will benefit much more from postal votes as their supporters are more committed to register a protest against the Government.

In the first mayoral election four years ago, Mr Livingstone won 38 per cent of first preferences to his Tory opponent's 26 per cent.

But as an independent, he won huge numbers of second preferences from backers of Labour's Frank Dobson, and clinched victory with a comfortable final margin of 58 per cent to 42 per cent.

This time around, the gap between the two front runners was expected to be much closer. An Evening Standard/YouGov poll this week showed that the Mayor had just a two point lead among those certain to vote.

In the wake of that survey, Labour embarked on frantic efforts yesterday to persuade its traditional supporters to turn up to the polling stations.

Party strategists seized on YouGov finding that among those "likely" to vote, Mr Livingstone had a much bigger lead and ordered thousands of activists to phone supporters to turn out.