Time to worry about a hung parliament?

Uncertainty is creeping back into the run-up to the election, says Merryn Somerset Webb. Investors might like to cast their eyes abroad.

Should you be worrying about the UK general election ending in a hung parliament? The latest polls suggest that Theresa May's overall lead is no longer solid. She hasn't done well at either explaining or supporting her manifesto and we know that Labour's lead over the Tories in the 18-24 age groups is huge: it has doubled since 2015 to 37 percentage points. If the young turn up to vote this month, they have a chance of swinging the result to the left.

We'd then find ourselves dealing with the likelihood of a more fractious Brexit than expected, alongside a nervous stockmarket and a volatile currency. Not much fun. Worse, we may end up having to have another election or even the most awful of all the awful political possibilities, another referendum. But it isn't yet time to panic: May should still win.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.