Cameron said in a statement this morning that he is likely to be gone by the time of the Conservative Party conference in October.
In a dramatic turn that polls did not predict and which markets failed to price in, the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union.
With all 382 districts declared, the leave camp secured 51.9 percent of the vote with 17.4 million votes, throwing markets around the world into turmoil and prompting sterling to hit its lowest level since 1985.
Across Europe, markets opened deep into negative territory, with STOXX Europe 600 down 8 percent, the FTSE 100 opening down 7.83 percent, Germany’s Dax down by 8.6 percent and the CAC 40 in France down by almost the same amount.
Markets around the world have already been roiled by the shock result:
- In Japan the Nikkei 225 was down some 8 percent
- Sterling has fallen 8 percent against the dollar and nearly 3 percent against the euro.
- The prices of Brent and WTI have both dropped some 4.5 percent.
- The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond has fallen 14 percent.
- Dow futures now down 530 points
Banks were bearing the brunt of the sell-off. the U.K.’s Lloyds Bank was off some 30 percent on the open, as was Barclays.
The construction sector was off some 12 percent across Europe while the banking sector took a 12.2 percent hit.
The ramifications of the result are reverberating across the U.K., European Union and the wider political and economic establishment.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) who has been a prominent member of the leave campaign, claimed victory, saying June 23 would become known as the U.K.’s “Independence Day” and should be declared a national holiday. The UKIP leader also called for a “Brexit government,” implying that the current leadership of Prime Minister David Cameron is no longer tenable.
Cameron is expected to make a statement from 10 Downing Street at 08.15 BST on Friday morning.
In a statement issued early Friday, the Bank of England said it would “take all necessary steps to meet its responsibilities for monetary and financial stability.”
The vote to leave will have implications across Europe for the global financial industry, especially as the City of London played on its access to the European Union.
In a memo to staff, JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, warned staff on Friday “we may need to make changes to our European legal entity structure and the location of some roles. While these changes are not certain, we have to be prepared to comply with new laws as we serve our clients around the world.”
Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, sought to calm markets’ nerves in a statement emphasizing that the bank has a “long history of adapting to change” and has been planning for the potential consequences of this result “for many months”.
The total has shown a wider margin of support for the leave campaign. Nonetheless, several declarations from inner-city areas in London, Northern Ireland and Scotland showed strong support for remaining in the EU.
As the result became apparent, some nationalist Scottish and Northern Irish politicians slammed the result, saying that it did not represent their electorates’ views.
Inner-London areas showed strong support for remaining in the EU with Wandsworth, the City of London and Islington reporting 75 percent of the votes in favor of staying. East London and neighboring Essex areas were far more ambivalenthowever, favoring a Brexit.
The dramatic result came quick on the heels of several opinion polls released after voting ended at 10 p.m. London time. They had showed that the majority of people favored staying in the EU.
As polls closed in the U.K., a YouGov poll showed 52 percent of respondents favored staying in the economic and political bloc, while 48 percent preferred leaving.
A separate Ipsos-Mori poll taken Thursday, after 546 telephone interviews, showed that 54 percent of voters had voted to remain in the EU and 46 percent to leave, according to the market research company.
Voting stopped at 10 p.m. London time and the counting of votes in 382 local areas, across 12 regions, continues. Voter turnout was 72.1 percent, according to U.K. Press Association data.
Early on in the count the working-class region of Sunderland in the north of England reported a higher-than-expected vote to leave,causing markets to react negatively with sterling, oil and gold prices falling and that trend has continued. Sunderland was seen as a bellwether of whether the leave campaign had managed to sway a blue-collar demographic.
The referendum’s expected result was not predicted by most analysts. Several polls released earlier yesterday had pointed to a lead for the remain camp and prominent members of the leave campaign, including Farage, had been ready to concede victory to the remain camp.
