Jacob Rees-Mogg’s views are more common than his critics might care to believe

To judge from the media’s collective horror, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s views on abortion (‘completely opposed… in all circumstances?’ ‘Yes’) and same-sex marriage (‘I support the teaching of the Catholic Church’ – i.e., against) are absolutely beyond the pale. Such ‘appalling bigotry’, as Suzanne Moore puts it in The Guardian, has ‘no place in public life’. Meanwhile, the Evening Standard’s curation of Twitter vox pops runs the full gamut from ‘extreme’ to ‘extremely out of touch’. Any hopes he may secretly have harboured of becoming PM must, hopes everyone from The Times cartoon to Gary Lineker, now be ‘aborted’. But just how extreme are the Hon. Member for North East Somerset’s views really? How odd is Rees-Mogg?

As it happens, this very week data was released from the latest (i.e, autumn 2016) wave of the British Social Attitudes survey – justly described in a recent Spectator leader as the ‘gold standard’ of social surveys.