This week marks exactly six months since the Brexit referendum. So how much have we learned over the past half a year about our future? What comes next? Zip. Zilch. Nada. In the wake of their remarkable victory, the Brexiteers have said, er…. very little. Never in the history of British politics has such a stunning victory been followed by such stunning silence.

So here are five questions that will need to be answered in 2017. Take them as my New Year checklist for any of you trying to make sense of it all.

First, will the Brexiteers start acting like winners? It really is the strangest thing but I am increasingly persuaded that at some deep, unspoken psychological level many of the leading Brexiteers would have preferred to have lost on June 23.

Listen to their spluttering indignation aimed at anyone who has the temerity to ask them for a plan. Read the splenetic bilge in the Brexit papers as they condemn anyone who disagrees with them as “enemies of the people”. Look at the rage with which they continue to denounce Brussels and all its works. The Brexiteers are so good at hating things, and so bad at running things. They prefer to shake their angry fists at the world rather than assume the responsibility that comes with victory.

But time is running out. In 2017 they will need to stop fighting yesterday’s battles and do the messy grind of government instead. They will soon discover that taking decisions about Europe is a lot more difficult than shouting at Europe.

Second, will Brexit be hard or soft? It will, I regret to say, be far harder and more self-harming than it need be.

This is not because of the conventional wisdom that says Theresa May’s focus on immigration makes a “soft” Brexit impossible. In my view, it is not beyond the ingenuity of Theresa May and Angela Merkel — if they wanted to — to forge a new pan-European approach to immigration that deals both with the EU’s porous external borders, which are of huge concern to millions of voters across the continent, and with some of the concerns about freedom of movement in the UK.

It is not as if mass migration is a new issue: a quarter of a million Belgian refugees flowed into Britain during the First World War, the biggest single influx of its kind in our history. In the Sixties, Harold Wilson’s government unveiled sweeping changes to allay public concerns about immigration. As Labour leader Richard Crossman wrote at the time: “Politically, fear of immigration is the most powerful undertow today.” This is not a new problem.

No, the reason I believe that Theresa May will be driven towards the rocks of an increasingly hard Brexit is simply this: her claim at the Conservative Party conference in September that Britain will never again abide by the rulings of the European Court of Justice makes staying in the single market very difficult. The single market, contrary to repeated claims from ministers, has very little to do with tariffs. It is — as Margaret Thatcher rightly recognised at its inception — a single body of rules that removes the threat of 28 countries inventing their own red tape to impede trade. And you can’t trade freely into a marketplace of rules if you’re not prepared to abide by them. Unlike the issue of immigration, Theresa May has created a rock and a hard place concerning the single market which cannot be negotiated away, unless she changes tack.

Third, will public opinion change? Of course it will. No snapshot of public opinion, especially one with such a narrow margin of victory, remains exactly the same for ever. What little polling evidence there is since the referendum suggests that a large share of those who didn’t vote would have voted Remain, that the margin between the two sides is even narrower now, and that many voters are unwilling to make any economic sacrifices for Brexit. Heaven knows what they will think as their gas, electricity and food prices go up next year because of the plummeting Brexit pound. No wonder hardline Brexiteers are screeching that we should pull out of the EU overnight — they know that with each passing month public opinion may slip away from them.

Will the rest of the EU implode? No. This, of course, is the real ulterior ambition for the most dedicated of Brexiteers. For them, yanking the UK out of Europe is only a means to a wider end: the destruction of the EU itself. The EU has big problems — most notably the north-south tensions within the single currency — but the Anglo-American political and media elite have consistently underestimated the determination of European governments to keep the EU going. For us, British membership of the EU has always been a pounds-and-pence calculation of costs and benefits. For other European countries it has symbolised much bigger things: peace over war, democracy after fascism, freedom after communism. Don’t expect that to evaporate in 2017.

Theresa May has created a rock and a hard place concerning the single market which cannot be negotiated away Nick Clegg

Finally, will the Brexit talks affect the economy in 2017? Undoubtedly. As the Bank of England and others have pointed out, some of the collateral damage is already in the pipeline, especially higher prices following a lower pound. Sadly, this will mean that many people’s take-home pay will be worth less just as it was finally starting to recover from the 2008 crisis.

That will hit consumer spending, and households are once again mired in very high levels of debt. Investors will get jittery as the Brexit talks stop and start. The public finances will deteriorate. I sincerely hope we can avoid a Brexit recession but it would be foolish to discount the risk. Given that Brexiteers promised voters an economic utopia, not to mention £350 million per week for the NHS, they might have some serious explaining to do.

So hold on to your hats and buckle up — reality will start to bite in 2017.