WATCH | Is Britain ready for Brexit?

With just a year to go until the UK leaves the European Union,the hardest questions about what the breakup means still haven’t been answered.

Theresa May’s task for the next few months is to do that, and she’ll need to battle Parliament, her party and Brussels on the way.

There’s a good chance the UK reaches Brexit day with no clear vision of what the future relationship with its biggest trading partner might be.

May will send the withdrawal treaty through Parliament, but it will deal only with the divorce –the past. The agreement she secures from Brussels on what comes next, the future relationship,can be vaguely worded, with more diplomatic flourishes than hard trade detail. And it’s not binding. Brexit will have been delivered but little else resolved.

But it’s also possible that the next few months force May into a closer relationship with the bloc than she has planned. Lawmakers are plotting how to keep the UK in the customs union,the arrangement that keeps cross-border trade free within the bloc’s members. Business is lobbying hard too.

In May’s office, the view is that the tight referendum result – 52% voted to leave the EU, against 48% voting to stay – can’t be interpreted as a mandate for an extreme Brexit. In her speech at the start of the month, the prime minister said that it was important to have a deal the whole country could unite behind.

A proposal to stay in the customs union would help solve the problem of the Irish border, and would give the EU a negotiating position it can engage with(remember, the UK has yet to show the EU, at least in public, a proposal it doesn’t reject as unacceptable cherry-picking.)

And May can keep her most important red line:that freedom of movement will end with Brexit. As Sam Lowe, a trade expert at the Centre for European Reform puts it: “It only requires one red line to move.”