Good news for Edinburgh home owners: the gravy train is coming to town

Whether Scotland votes for independence or not, the size of the political establishment and its entourage is set to grow enormously. That can only be good for the Scottish capital’s housing market, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

It is festival time in Edinburgh. This means that you are pretty much obliged to either see a show or be in a show every day for a month. Mostly I choose the seeing option, but on Saturday, I allowed myself to be persuaded to go on Mrs Moneypenny's panel show.

You never know what kind of direction Mrs M is going to go in with this kind of thing, so my fellow guests and I braced ourselves for the worst when the questions started. The good news was that it was mostly pretty gentle (except for when she made us help audience members make bird feeders out of cotton wool and plastic bottles). However, she did rather go for me on the matter of property.

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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.