Effing Clowns - how Sturgeon politicised the pandemic

Her mass deletion of WhatsApp messages clearly wasn’t thorough enough

Twat”, “arsehole”, “fucking clown”. We now know from evidence to the Covid Inquiry that Scottish government ministers and officials were as prone to offensive language as Dominic Cummings. Those first two epithets were from the then health secretary, Humza Yousaf, referring to a Scottish Labour MSP. The clown of course, was Boris Johnson as described by Nicola Sturgeon in a message to one of her officials.

These are only the most sweary of the ministerial out-takes highlighted by Covid Inquiry in its devastating inspection of how Scotland’s governing classes behaved during the Covid pandemic. We learned that Nicola Sturgeon’s chief of staff, Liz Lloyd, had suggested staging a “good old political rammy” so that she didn’t have to speak “about sick people all the time”. Humza Yousaf admitted to Jason Leitch that he was “winging it” and that he expected to be “found out”. Mr Leitch agreed.

There have been calls for the National Clinical Director to resign over some salty remarks about opposition politicians. He called the Labour MSP, Daniel Johnson, a “smartarse”. He may well have been justified, but civil servants are supposed to avoid crude partisanship. At any rate, Humza Yousaf has apologised for the revelations for which he said there was “no excuse”.

If the Scottish government’s policy of mass deletion of WhatsApp messages was an exercise in pre-emptive news management, designed to insulate the Scottish government from embarrassment and Freedom of Information searches, it clearly hasn’t worked. But this is about much more than just bad language.