Rory Bremner must feel like giving up. For years he’s done his best to parody George Bush’s strangled syntax and Tony Blair’s White House poodle act, yet here he is, on the night, completely outclassed by the guys themselves. The Bush-Blair cross-talk, picked up by a lurking microphone at the G8 summit in St Petersburg, was beyond satire.

Can you imagine Bremner allowing a line like “Yo, Blair, how are ya doin’?” into his script? He’d be laughed off stage. As for Mr Blair’s stumbling attempt to justify a trip to the Middle East in advance of Condoleezza Rice, it is surely too cringe-making to be allowed on television. I’m not even sure if readers of The Times can bear to hear it again, but here goes: “Well, it’s only if, I mean, you know. If she’s got a, or if she needs the ground prepared, as it were. Because obviously if she goes out, she’s got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.” As a bleak definition of British diplomacy and its limitations today, that takes a lot of beating.

On the other hand, I rather warmed to Mr Bush’s gangsta rap summary of the crisis in Lebanon. “You see, the thing is,” he said, alluding to Russia’s influence in the area, “what they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.” He’s right, of course. Why has no one else thought of it before? If only everyone spoke their mind so clearly, things might get done rather more quickly than the quagmire that is modern diplomacy. I think I prefer Mr Bush’s shorthand version of world affairs than listening to the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, burying herself in obfuscation on BBC radio yesterday as she attempted to avoid criticising Israeli tactics. It was like being wrapped in blancmange.

If the Blair-Bush dialogue is typical, then it seems that behind the scenes world leaders dispense with the normal constraints of syntax, grammar and sometimes indeed sense, reaching for a kind of texted equivalent of the English language instead of bothering with properly constructed sentences. Since that is how most people under the age of 20, and anyone with access to a mobile phone, communicates anyway, perhaps the time has come to revise the cumbersome language of diplomacy, and tell it like it is.

We will, of course, need a new kind of dictionary. Thus, the Blair phrase for world trade negotiations is “this trade thingy”, which is all-embracing, if a little imprecise. Mr Bush refers to the Syrian leader, possibly sarcastically, as “sweet,” while Mr Blair prefers “honey” — these are insider terms that required definition. When the President says he wants Kofi Annan to “make something happen”, we know what he means, though we could do with a little more clarity on what exactly he has in mind. And when he exclaims, “Gotta go home. Got something to do tonight”, we need to know whether this involves anyone other than Mrs Bush.

The pluses of this new language are, of course, enormous. We could dispense with tiresome old canards such as “we note with deep concern” or “take the gravest exception” to a hostile act, and replace them with something altogether more explicit such as “We is close to squeezing the trigger”, a popular rap expression, or even “you have dissed us and that is well out of order”. It would be quicker to say that Her Majesty’s Government is “cool with that” rather than expressing “the warmest approval”, or viewing it “with appreciation”, if only because it would slot easily into a text message and look better in a snappy headline.

True, much of today’s street jargon is more to do with sex, drugs and extreme violence rather than peace-making, but it is infinitely adaptable. A swift search on the internet revealed more than 280,000 sites for various forms of vocabulary, constantly up-dated, and available to anyone who, like David Cameron, wants to get closer to hoodies or rappers.

It could be, of course, that even this street jargon is a bit on the wordy side, and that it would be better to reply on the shorthand now customary for text messages. North Korea, for instance, is clearly guilty of SOHF, or Sense of Humour Failure. Washington’s position on global warming is WUSIWUG — What You See is What You Get. And, after decades of unproductive negotiation with Iran, the White House could simply text Tehran regularly with YYSSW: Yeah, Yeah, Sure, Sure, Whatever.

And yet the picture that emerges of the Bush-Blair relationship, revealed by that brief snatch of overheard conversation, is a depressing one. Even allowing for the verbal shorthand in which they talk, there is something shallow and simplistic about their world view. Neither gives any indication that they are pursuing a dynamic or creative approach to solving the current crisis, and policy seems to consist of a few half-formed ideas spun out at random. An approach to the hellish bombardment of Beirut that reduces negotiations to a quick image-building trip to the Middle East, and refers laughingly to a key player in Syria, does nothing to suggest a firm grasp of the situation. “I felt like telling Kofi (Annan) to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen,” says Mr Bush. Well yes, we all would. But is this the limit of what the President of the United States feels able to suggest?

Broken syntax and stumbling sentences are revealing, because they give the impression of half-formed policies and poorly worked-out ideas. That is the very opposite of the language of diplomacy, with its well-crafted phrases and its carefully weighted emphases. No one is suggesting that our leaders should suddenly start talking to each other like a Metternich or a Talleyrand. It would, on the other hand, be nice if they made some sense.

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