Barack Obama's foreign policy aide Samantha Power needs to brush up on the rules for talking to journalists. In an interview with The Scotsman, Power let her anger at Hillary Clinton's campaign get the best of her, revealing her true feelings about the competition.

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: "Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.

So why didn't the paper honor her mid-sentence request? It's not because they hate women, for one!

WHEN is off the record actually off the record? When the rules are established in advance.

Journalists are always looking for knowledge and want the information they receive to be available for publication.

But occasionally an interviewer will accept an exchange is "off the record" and that the conversation is not attributable. Remarks can be used as background to inform a journalist's article.

If a conversation is to be off the record, that agreement is usually thrashed out before the interview begins. Sometimes, public figures say something and then attempt to retract it by insisting it was "off the record" after the event.

But by then it is too late, particularly if it is in the public interest that the story be published.

In this instance, Samantha Power was promoting her book and it was established in advance that the interview was on the record.