The first thing that struck me on Thursday morning was the queue. Cripes! Unprecedented at my polling station, to have to wait for a pencil. The second thing was the jollity. In my corner of London, people dressed for work were smiling - smiling! - and exchanging pleasantries. One man looked as though he was about to break into the Hallelujah Chorus. My six-year-old asked if we could go back and vote again.

The reason for London's burst of democratic energy, the dramatic 25 per cent rise in turnout, was Ken v Boris. This was a battle for the soul of the capital, not just a referendum on Gordon Brown. At the time of writing it looks as though the strenuous efforts to portray Boris Johnson as a hybrid of Oswald and Max Mosley have backfired. “Be very afraid”, The Guardian opined on Thursday, having dredged up every minor celebrity who could be relied on to brand him a racist. I found the ranters more scary than their target.

With all the glossy magazine interviews, the contest has felt more like a gunfight at the OK! corral than a shoot-out over anything important. But Ken Livingstone's eight-year experiment has proved that the mayor is a bit more than just an extra tier of management which puts up our council tax and sends out self-promoting magazines. With seven million voters, the mayor has a bigger mandate than any MP. His official power is limited but his profile is potent. Mr Livingstone has redefined civic politics, to the extent that no one any longer talks about abolishing the mayoralty.

The similarities between their policies have masked that Mr Johnson's emphasis and style as mayor would be dramatically different to Mr Livingstone's. I don't just mean the hope of some voters that he will provide non-stop entertainment of the kind that Conservative Central Office dreads and which is, at this moment, the only cloud on David Cameron's silver lining. I mean that a Johnson regime would likely be significantly more open, accountable and perhaps even civilised.

The Boris plan is to govern as a chairman rather than a chief executive, like Michael Bloomberg, New York's Mayor. He will appoint at least three deputy mayors, responsible for transport, crime and economic development. Heroic attempts have been made to find people of stature to fill these posts. This is partly as a result of Central Office's desire to ensure that there are several safe pairs of hands to catch Boris if he trips, and partly because of what seems to be a genuine belief in accountability.

Mr Livingstone came to see the mayoralty as his personal fiefdom. He ran the city with a bunch of acolytes who were largely invisible except when dragged blinking from their shiny HQ by scandals. Mr Johnson has been right to seek independent minds such as Kate Hoey.

That is not to deny Mr Livingstone's legacy. Few of us wait long for a bus any more. We can get on the Tube without standing for hours at a ticket window. Even when we're suffering on the Northern Line, we know that the fat cats in limos above are paying the congestion charge. But we know far too little about the cost of these achievements. The bulk of the profits from the congestion charge still goes to Capita, not into buses. Tube fares have risen steeply, but revenues have barely outpaced costs. The apparently wilful underestimates of the Olympics budget are staggering.

The Olympics could turn out to be the new mayor's biggest headache. He will not be able to slough off responsibility on to Sebastian Coe. He will need a serious financier to get a grip, even though he will not have total control. He would do well to copy another of New York's innovations and create an Office of Management and Budget to keep an independent eye on these and other figures. Mr Johnson's strongest suit as mayor, though also his weakness, is surely his frankness. He has already said that crime will be a top priority. His proposals to put conductors back on buses, and to deny free travel to

troublemakers, make sense. But Londoners would be even more empowered if they were armed with more information. Mr Livingstone has been right to support the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, but has gone too far in regurgitating crime statistics that almost no one believes. The Met's favourite graphs do not chime with fears of guns, knives and antisocial behaviour. Mr Livingstone prides himself on having increased police numbers. But the profusion of uniforms on London streets - with traffic wardens, community support officers, security guards and “civil protection guards” donning more and more stripes, like an army of vigilante zebras, make London seem more and more like a Big Brother state and feel, paradoxically, less and less safe.

London's mayor, unlike New York's, does not control the police. But like New York's, he could bypass the police and give the citizens more information. All of us should know what the crime levels are in our street, our area, and how the police plan to tackle it. All of us should know how the mayor spends his budget. The Assembly is too weak to hold the mayor to account, so Londoners should have the information.

There are some in the Tory camp who would secretly prefer to cap their big local wins with a Boris loss. They fear innumerable headaches. But Ken Livingstone got away with innumerable gaffes: they were part of his charm. It is his arrogance that has damaged him. The first thing the new mayor should do is to legislate for term limits. Personality politics have enlivened this contest no end, they are a shot in the arm for democracy. But the mayoralty cannot be a cult of personality.

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