I STARTED a Twitter storm this morning. Actually, I say storm but it was more of a light flurry, but it generated a deal of interest when I observed after listening to Liz Kendall being interviewed on the wireless: Why do people who are about to obfuscate always say: "To be clear . . .”?

Soon the twittersphere was buzzing with other examples of what politicians actually mean when they employ certain phrases and we had some lively exchanges about the strange, coded language of PolSpeak. I can’t name-check all the participants but thanks to all who chipped in, especially ex-Herald politics colleague Douglas Fraser, now of the BBC parish.

Among the ways of refusing to answer a question were, “What I CAN say is” and, “Well, I think the REAL question is”. “Let me finish,” indicates a demand to use a scripted line that has not been deployed yet.

Naturally, any comment opening with “in all honesty” will be followed by something starkly dishonest, while “frankly” is a sure-fire precursor to a complete lack of candour.

And of course “What people are telling me (optional: on the doorstep)” is entirely made-up guff (optional: from someone who hasn’t chapped a door in years).

My favourite observation was: “I must admit when I hear David Cameron say ‘It’s the right thing to do’ I think, who’s he shafting now?”

But are we harsh on the politicians? For any of us who have tried it, stringing ad hoc words together under time pressure and the proximity of a microphone is far from easy. We might suggest it’s a basic entry-grade skill for politicians, but there is a wide skill-set required for the political craft and being dextrous with unscripted words is actually somewhat rare.

As our political editor Magnus Gardham pointed out in a column recently, Nicola Sturgeon is extremely unusual in her ability to answer questions in such a way that her quotes need no tidying up at all. Her replies flow in finished sentences, are lucid and crisp, and impart exactly what she sets out to say.

There is almost no other politician of whom that could be said. Alex Salmond was good in bursts but tended to veer off into fresh territory. Donald Dewar was known for his pauses and “ums” but no-one questioned his intelligence.

His successor, Henry McLeish had such a tendency under pressure to mangle syntax and segue off into the mildly surreal that Holyrood journalists at one time kept a record of what they termed McCliches. My favourite was at the height of the BSE crisis when he said: “No-one likes travelling with carcasses, Sir David, be they infected or otherwise.”

But Mr McLeish was an amateur when it came to grammatic vandalism by comparison with John Prescott, who on a regular basis managed to conflate not just sentence structures but individual words.

I read this morning a transcript of a Donald Trump interview which showed that he is the equal of Lord Prescott when it comes to the elision, the non sequitur, the conflation, the rambling and the barking.

But some of our best and most articulate politicians have not been immune to the sheer difficulty of unrehearsed speech. The actor David Tennant famously cracked the notoriously difficult radio show Just Minute on the subject of the stage direction, “Exit, pursued by bear” but that became news precisely because of how difficult it is to speak even for such a short time without stumbling.

Douglas Alexander, whatever your politics, has been one of Scotland’s most accomplished politicians of the last generation but I recall covering the Perth by-election 20 years ago when he was beginning his ascent of the greasy pole.

That was the election where, just before his death, Sir Nicky Fairbairn denouced his successor as candidate, John Godfrey, as “an unelectable party clone.”

It was a tilt for Labour in a Tory-held SNP marginal but we could all see Alexander was a bright prospect. However, he had a slight verbal tick, using the phrase “quite clearly” as a sub-conscious way of buying time before answering questions.

The journalists created a game of “quite clearly” bingo where we each predicted how many times he would deploy it during the daily press conference. He was to rise to Foreign Secretary before the greasy poll kicked into reverse.

The point is that handling live interviews is a skill not every politician has, and certainly not early in their careers. Politicians should also avoid the phrases above because it means, quite simply, they have been found out. Better still, try speaking like Jeremy Corbyn, who doesn’t sound like a politician.