(Bloomberg Opinion) -- So far, the race to succeed Theresa May as the head of the Conservative Party hasn’t exactly been edifying. As the candidates unveiled their platforms this week, irresponsible tax and spending promises predominated. Implausible approaches to Brexit were aired, along with nonchalant talk of defaulting on public debts. Cocaine proved unexpectedly salient.
One thing nearly all the candidates had in common was a refusal to accept the precarious position the next party leader will be in. Far from having a popular mandate, as many of their proposals presuppose, the winner will be an unelected prime minister overseeing a minority government and a hugely fractious party. He or she will face a divided country, a slowing economy, a tight budget and simmering crises in public services.
Also: Brexit. As things stand, Britain is due to crash out of the European Union on Oct. 31. That leaves 140 days for the next prime minister to either persuade Parliament to pass the Brexit deal it has already rejected three times; coax all 27 EU countries to agree to a new and so far notional bargain that can also sustain a majority at home; seek another delay; or prepare for a chaotic no-deal exit on Halloween.
Alarmingly, most of the candidates have suggested that they’d be okay with that last option. In doing so, they seem to be following May’s playbook of keeping the worst-case scenario on the table for negotiating purposes. If that tactic ever made sense, it’s now doubly wrongheaded.
For starters, no one buys the bluff. No government could willingly allow a no-deal exit; it would amount to imposing the most damaging version of a policy that about half the country already despises, and one that Parliament has already explicitly rejected. (One candidate proposes to simply suspend the legislature to get around this irritating snag.) By the government’s own reckoning, such a scenario would reduce Britain’s economic growth by nearly 10 percentage points over 15 years relative to staying in.
Second, the cost of preparing for no deal — or being seen to prepare for it — is only going up. May spent billions on Potemkin emergency planning in an effort to get Brussels to take her threat seriously. For now, no-deal operational centers have been shut, contingency plans shelved and civil servants moved to new jobs: Pausing and then restarting these efforts involves enormous additional expense. Meanwhile, the candidates are boldly proposing to raid the government’s no-deal reserve to pay for their other priorities.
None of this amounts to a serious attempt to resolve Brexit. It won’t make the EU any more likely to accept the Tories’ preferred terms. It won’t help negotiate new trade deals, give businesses more certainty or settle regulatory impasses. And it won’t answer difficult questions about the Irish border.
Almost all the candidates seem content to elide or obfuscate these complexities, much as May did. And the ones who are confronting them more directly are paying a price. In fact, the only Tory contender proposing to do the truly sensible thing — put the matter before the public in a second referendum — has bowed out ignominiously.
Party leadership contests are seldom high-minded affairs, and Mario Cuomo’s old dictum about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose comes to mind. Even so, Britain is hurtling down an extremely dangerous path with few obvious off-ramps. If the Tory candidates recognize the urgency of confronting hard truths, they’re showing few signs of it.
Editorials are written by the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board.
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