So does this mean that people really favour a hard Brexit?

This is a highly contestable inference. One reason is that, again, this was not a normal opinion polling process. Respondents were forced to state a preference. They were not given the option of saying “don’t know” or “neither”.

Further, respondents were not given any sense by the framing of the question of the consequences of the choice of basket. For instance, in the “no deal” basket there were superficially attractive items such as “no payment” to the EU and rather anodyne-sounding ones such “some administrative barriers to trade and 2.5 per cent tariffs”.

There was no mention of the fact that “no deal” would mean the UK being in breach of its international treaty obligations. There was no hint at the travel chaos and economic pain that would inevitably follow such a “cliff-edge” outcome.

Similarly, the hard Brexit scenario contained no mention of the economic pain relative to the soft scenario.

While the researchers, understandably, wanted to avoid prejudicing the choices of respondents by elaborating on consequences in what might be seen as a leading way, their failure to give respondents any relevant economic context to their soft, hard and no deal baskets arguably went to the other extreme and undermined the value of their findings.

The claim of Sara Hobolt that “there is on aggregate higher levels of support for outcomes that resemble the ‘hard Brexit’ position put forward by the government” does not seem reliable given that the “outcomes” selected by the researchers were so limited.