Former Scottish Tory leader Baroness Ruth Davidson said the idea that the prime minister was going to stay on until the party conference was "arrant nonsense"

"There's no way he can stay on until October. It's arrant nonsense to think he can. Someone needs to grip this."

One reason for this, he posits: “The economy is a complicated system that is inherently difficult to understand, so propositions like these” — the arrant nonsense in question — “are all that saves us from intellectual nihilism.”

Was it not a dangerous word, too closely connected to Hobbes and to dubious stories about sympathetic magic told by Digby—someone whom John Evelyn, another early member, could dismiss as an arrant mountebank?

The country that invented Donald Duck is the last to discover his cynicism—and what arrant cynicism it is.