Mayor Rob Ford ended a six-month string of lies, denials, and evasions on Tuesday with a stunning admission that he smoked crack cocaine “about a year ago.” In a display of the audacity and defiance that have defined both his unforeseen rise to power and sordid fall from grace, he then pledged to continue to do his job despite a council uprising he did not acknowledge.

“To the residents of Toronto, I know I have let you down and I can’t do anything else but apologize. I apologize and I’m so sorry. I know I have to regain your trust and your confidence. I love my job. I love my job, I love this city, I love saving taxpayers money and I love being your mayor,” he said, sounding shaken, in a globally televised speech in the mayor’s office four hours after his impromptu bombshell in the hallway outside.

“There is important work that we must advance,” Ford said, “and important decisions that must be made. For the sake of the taxpayers of this great city, for the sake of the taxpayers, we must get back to work immediately. We must keep Toronto moving forward. I was elected to do a job and that’s exactly what I’m going to continue doing.”

Ford said he has “nothing left to hide.” But he fled the room immediately after his speech, and he did not address any of the dozens of questions the media have posed to him about issues other than the video: his associations with known and accused criminals, his clandestine exchanges and secret meetings with an accused drug dealer, and his knowledge of attempts to retrieve the crack video he said in May “doesn’t exist.”

He could face a humiliating challenge at the council meeting next Wednesday, where councillors plan to table a symbolic motion asking him to take a leave of absence and a second motion that would curb his power.

“I think he’s lost the moral authority to lead,” Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, a conservative ally, said moments after the admission. “We’re in uncharted territory.”

Ford’s hallway statement appeared to surprise his aides and his brother and “best friend,” Councillor Doug Ford, who spent the morning conducting an extraordinary attack on the chief of police and then attending a university journalism class. The mayor’s acknowledgment of illegal activity and refusal to relinquish power gave new momentum to the council efforts to persuade him to stand down.

Ford was urged by no less than the federal justice minister, Peter MacKay, to “get help.” His address included no mention of a rehabilitation program or medical treatment of any kind. A day earlier, he said his plan was “just don’t drink as much.”

Ford made his dramatic admission around 12:15 p.m., just after he got off the elevator where journalists have spent days camping out to try to get comment from him on the controversies that roiled his mayoralty even before the crack scandal erupted.

Ford ignored the media pack Monday. But on Tuesday, when reporters asked why he had not taken questions while his brother had, he suddenly turned to face the group. Sounding like a schoolteacher trying to prod young children toward the right answer, he said, calmly, “You asked me the question back in May. You can repeat that question.”

When a reporter eventually asked if he smokes crack, Ford said, “Exactly.”

“Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine,” he continued. “But no, do I, am I an addict? No. Have I tried it? Probably in one of my drunken stupors, probably approximately about a year ago. I answered your question. You ask the question properly, I’ll answer it. Yes, I’ve made mistakes. All I can do now is apologize and move on.”

Ford’s words jolted the nascent 2014 election campaign in which he has pledged to be a candidate. Radio host and former Progressive Conservative leader John Tory is now a safe bet to run, high-ranking Conservatives said, though he does not plan to make an announcement until the winter; a Tory bid would damage the chances of Councillor Karen Stintz.

“We’re putting the old band back together,” a senior Conservative close to Tory said, referring to the team from Tory’s 2003 run against David Miller.

The admission was a crippling blow to Ford’s reputation among much of the electorate as a tells-it-like-it-is straight shooter. And it exposed a disconnect between Ford’s unforgiving words on crime — he called last year for gun criminals, “thugs,” to be exiled from the city — and his own behaviour. The man who tried to sell the video, Mohamed Siad, is an alleged gang member charged with gun and drug trafficking.

The admission raised additional questions about Ford’s drug and alcohol use. Ford would not say how frequently he had smoked crack; he said he had “tried it.” And he said he could not recall the circumstances or the exact date of the incident he did admit to — because it happened “probably in one of my drunken stupors.”

“I don’t even remember,” he said. “Some of the stuff that you guys have seen me, the state I’ve been in? It’s a problem.”

Ford had spent much of the year vehemently denying accounts of the substance abuse that had been an open secret at city hall. He called Star reporters “pathological liars” for a March article about his apparent intoxication at a February military ball and attempts by his staff to persuade him to go to rehab.

The chain of events that led to the Tuesday admission began in May, when the Star and the U.S. website Gawker published accounts of a 90-second iPhone video that appeared to show him smoking crack. Ford denied the video existed, and he issued a carefully worded present-tense denial of crack use: “I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine.”

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Ford said Tuesday that he would have disclosed his previous use had he ever been asked directly whether he had ever smoked crack. In fact, he had been asked directly by six Star reporters and numerous journalists from other media outlets.

“I wasn’t lying,” he insisted. “You didn’t ask the correct questions.”

Unless he is imprisoned, Ford can remain in office until the conclusion of his four-year term next December if does not choose to resign. Council lacks the power to force him from office, and Toronto has no voter recall legislation.

Much of council called for Ford to take a leave of absence even before he arrived at city hall on Tuesday. Moments before the admission, Minnan-Wong, a possible mayoral candidate, made public a harshly worded censure motion that would ask him to “take a temporary leave of absence to address his personal issues.”

“The evidence presented to date suggests the mayor has a substance abuse problem. The mayor consorts with known criminals and/or individuals involved in the sale and distribution of drugs,” Minnan-Wong says in the motion, which was seconded by another member of Ford’s cabinet-like executive, Peter Milczyn. “The mayor misled the residents of the City of Toronto.”

Another councillor, Ford opponent John Filion, presented a motion that would temporarily strip the mayor of the power to dismiss and appoint committee leaders, theoretically empowering them to speak out against Ford without the fear that they will lose their powerful posts.

And some councillors, according to centrist Jaye Robinson, spoke of a drastic measure that may violate the provincial law governing the city government: “cutting the mayor’s office budget so dramatically that it wouldn’t be able to function.” That proposal is unlikely to pass, she said.

The day’s events at city hall riveted television viewers and newspaper readers around the world. The New York Times ran regular updates; the “Yes, I smoked crack” quote was translated into Spanish in Madrid-based newspaper El Mundo and into German for Spiegel Online.

Ford’s lawyer, Dennis Morris, told CP24 that he didn’t think Ford “advised anyone” that the admission was coming. On morning radio, Doug Ford, the mayor’s only remaining vehement defender, made and repeated an incendiary call for Police Chief Bill Blair to “step down” while the probe continues, over “bias” he alleged Blair demonstrated at the Thursday news conference where the chief confirmed the existence of the crack video.

Doug Ford held a morning news conference of his own to repeat his criticism of Blair, who he said “wanted to go out and put a political bullet right between the mayor’s eyes.” Less than two hours later, the mayor himself uttered the words that may signal the death of his career.

Blair said he would not respond to “personal attacks.” In the afternoon, Doug Ford, silent, was the only person at his brother’s side during the speech.

“I kept this from my family — especially my brother Doug — my staff, my council colleagues, because I was embarrassed and ashamed,” the mayor said.

While Ford has been consistent in his refusal to resign, his strategy has veered wildly since Blair’s news conference. On his Sunday radio show , he apologized “sincerely,” but only for two instances of public drunkenness. On Monday, he dodged a question about crack use — “I’m not an addict,” he said — and claimed he could run the city by himself. Tuesday’s bombshell, he said, eased a mental burden.

“With today’s announcement,” he said, “I know I embarrassed everyone in the city, and I will be forever sorry. There is only one person to blame for this, and that is myself. I know that admitting my mistake was the right thing to do, and I feel like 1,000 pounds have been lifted off my shoulders.”

He added: “I can’t explain how difficult this was to do. I hope, I hope that nobody, that nobody, has to go through what I have gone through. I know what I did was wrong and admitting it was the most difficult, embarrassing thing I have ever had to do.”

Media lawyers will be making court submissions by Friday to argue for the release of information censored from the police document about Ford and Lisi that was partially revealed on Thursday.