Voters feel crushed by energy costs, rising joblessness and a credit crunch, and they are not happy about it. This is turning into a scary year to be an incumbent in office.

That’s certainly true in England and Wales, where voters fed up with the policies of Prime Minister Gordon Brown took it out on Labor Party members, as some 300 were swept out of municipal offices, including the mayor of London. If similar margins hold in upcoming national elections, the Conservatives will take over the House of Commons and select the new prime minister.

Gone is London’s eight-year mayor, Ken Livingstone, sometimes called “Red Ken” for his far-left rhetoric — though in practice he was much more pragmatic. The new man: former journalist and Conservative Member of Parliament Boris Johnson, 43, derided in some circles as a “joke” and a “clown.”

Some are stunned that Mr. Johnson got elected, given his rumpled suits, a hairstyle that looks like an unkempt yellow-white haystack, an entertaining sex life, eccentric writings and a penchant for making rude and hurtful remarks (he used racist language to talk about member nations of the British Commonwealth and advised Liverpool to stop “wallowing” in victimhood after Liverpudlian Ken Bigley was taken hostage in Iraq and beheaded). As an MP, he rode a bike to work most days, and said he only ran into trouble once: “when I hit a French tourist.”

His quirks charm some people and offend others but in any case, he got elected on the basis of a strong platform.

That included pledges to slash city bureaucracy (starting with the mayor’s 70-member media staff), to ban alcohol on the subway (or the Underground, as the Brits call it), to make it easier for commuters to pay a tax for working in London, and to combat youth violence. He also wants to preserve one of the great symbols of London — the double-decker red buses, which Mayor Livingstone planned to replace. In his first speech as mayor, Mr. Johnson declared with his usual tartness that he would not tolerate unsupportive officials in his administration. “If there are any dogs in the manger, then I will have those dogs humanely euthanized,” he said.

But he also had nice things to say about his statist predecessor, London’s first executive mayor, whom he described as a “very considerable public servant.” He said of Mr. Livingstone, “You shaped the office of mayor. You gave it national prominence, and when London was attacked on 7 July 2005 you spoke for London.”

We’ll see whether a man with such an oversized and sometimes abrasive personality can manage one of the world’s greatest and most diverse cities. Certainly, bloated bureaucracy and crime seem like worthy problems to attack.

Meanwhile, Conservative Party chief David Cameron is licking his chops, looking forward to the political demise of Prime Minister Brown after the latter calls elections, probably in 2010. There’s a general sense that Labor, in power since 1997, has overstayed its welcome. It happens to all parties in real democracies, and should.