Boris Johnson was forced into a climbdown on the first day of the official election campaign after he agreed to stop using the mayoral Twitter account for his re-election campaign.

YouGov polling widened Johnson's lead against Ken Livingstone to eight percentage points, but the results were overshadowed by the decision of his campaign team to switch the account name @MayorofLondon to @BorisJohnson, transferring at a stroke the 253,144 followers tracking the activities of the London mayoralty to Johnson's campaign.

To the fury of the Labour party, Johnson's team also replaced a link to the City Hall website with the link to his campaign site, backboris2012.com.

Labour claimed the decision to migrate the official mayoral Twitter account, set up in May 2008 and managed by the publicly funded Greater London Authority, to support Johnson's re-election bid was potentially a misuse of resources, and swiftly referred the matter to the GLA's monitoring officer.

Johnson's team initially argued that the account was owned by Twitter, not the GLA, and claimed it was Johnson's popularity that had attracted the followers to the account in the first place.

Within hours, Johnson's campaign issued a statement saying that in light of the "hysteria" caused, the Tory candidate would no longer use the account for election purposes, although the @BorisJohnson name remains.

The account was set up after Johnson was elected and was briefly called @BorisJohnson, but within a few weeks the mayor decided to change to @MayorofLondon, according to Johnson's team.

A campaign spokesman said the decision to change the account name back to Boris Johnson had been done in the interests of transparency. "As he entered the campaign he was determined to ensure there was no confusion between him as mayor and him as a candidate, and therefore changed the name of his Twitter account.

"He did not expect this openness and honesty to have created such hysteria. So in case there is even one Londoner who has a problem with what he did, he will not use that account for the campaign and instead can be followed from the political front on @BackBoris2012."

The campaign nevertheless used the original Twitter account to promote the separate re-election account. The official City Hall account said: "To be clear – @borisjohnson will only be used for discussing mayoral duties. To follow me on the campaign trail, follow @BackBoris2012."

Ken Livingstone's campaign said: "It stinks of the abuse of public resources for the Conservative party to appropriate the official social media of the mayor.

"To compare like with like, the No 10 Twitter feed was set up under Gordon Brown but has stayed as an official feed since David Cameron took over. This is the mayor of London's official Twitter feed, has been embedded on to the GLA website and promoted there, and has been developed since its inception in May 2008 to promote the work of the elected mayor. The Conservative party is clearly benefiting from taxpayer-funded public servants who have built up an official mayoral Twitter feed."