Election 2017: The key quotes after the shock exit poll

Britain voted Thursday in an election that started out as an attempt by Prime Minister Theresa May to increase her party’s majority in Parliament ahead of Brexit negotiations but was upended by terror attacks in Manchester and London during the campaign’s closing days.

The Conservatives are 12 seats short of the 326 they need for an absolute majority in the Commons.

An exit poll predicted the Conservatives would win 314 seats in the 650-member parliament and the opposition Labour Party 266, meaning no clear victor and a “hung parliament”. The pound made a slight recovery going into Thursday’s elections, but was still nowhere close to pre-Brexit levels.

But with Brexit talks due to start on June 19, the prospect of Mrs May emerging from the election weakened – or perhaps fatally damaged – was causing consternation across the bloc. “It would be a major endorsement for his brand of left-wing populist politics as well as for him personally”, journalist Merrick says. And she could be axed by her own party.

He told BBC News: “We’ve had our fingers burned by coalition, I don’t need to tell you that, so I find it very hard to see how Tim Farron would go back on what he has already said and indeed to persuade the membership of the Lib Dems that a coalition was a good idea from our point of view”.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, also warned against reading too much into the prediction, saying: “We have to have some scepticism about all polls at the moment”.

The Scottish Nationalist Party are predicted to take 34 seats, a significant drop from it current 56 seats, while the Liberal Democrats were polled to get 14 seats, up six.

Former Lib Dem Leader and former deputy PM Nick Clegg lost his Sheffield Hallam seat to Labour’s Jared O’Mara.

“There will be a huge post-mortem about having the general election, about the manifesto. about the style of the campaign”, former Conservative finance minister George Osborne said on ITV.

The result also plunges Britain into a period of renewed political chaos, with Brexit talks likely to be delayed and May’s personal authority shredded.

The FTSE 100 played catch-up as well, falling below the low of today’s session as traders digested the potential for a hung parliament.

European Union negotiators will want to know who they’re dealing with. “And our leader needs to take stock as well”.

May sharpened her rhetoric on the campaign trail and boasted she would be a “bloody hard woman” in Brussels, saying that “no deal is better than a bad deal”.

The SNP’s leader in Westminster Angus Robertson lost his seat to the Conservative Douglas Ross, who won 48 per cent of the vote.

But that gamble has backfired: Rather than handing May a landslide victory, the election has left no party with a clear majority, throwing into doubt who will govern Britain.

Eight people were killed near London Bridge on Saturday when three men drove a van into pedestrians and then stabbed revelers in an area filled with bars and restaurants.

The attacks led to scrutiny over May’s time as interior minister from 2010 to 2016, particularly since it emerged that some of the attackers had been known to police and security services. On the eve of the vote, Labour had closed to within around seven percentage points of the Conservatives’ predicted vote total in recent polls. Among the biggest issues for markets and the economy are whether Britain manages to get a deal to remain part of the European Union single market or, short of that, negotiate some privileged access to the bloc, the country’s biggest trading partner.

“Whatever the final result, our positive campaign has changed politics for the better”.