The Curse of WhatsApp

SNP ministers and advisers autodeleted their integrity by their preemptive cover up

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

WhatsApp? Tell me about it. Or rather don’t. My wife bans me from certain WhatsApp groups because she knows from experience that I would never deal with them, what with email, twitter, facebook and even the occasional analogue telephone call.

At least she has my back. I can’t understand why politicians have been so naive as to record on WhatsApp sensitive discussions about policy, like Covid, let alone those misogynistic jokes that George Osborne says were exchanged by Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. That is presumably before they fell out so spectacularly over Carrie’s influence on government.

Did they seriously think that they were never going to be asked to reveal them? Hasn’t the history of all forms of digital communication since the dawn of email demonstrated the truth of the adage that you should never say anything on any form of electronic messaging that you wouldn’t be happy to see on the front page of a national newspaper.

We never learn. So many people from the Scottish comedian Janey Godley to the former editor of Teen Vogue, Alexi McCammon, were forced to resign over unsavoury tweets posted before they knew how famous they were going to become. They thought they were only speaking to mates. Godley’s were about disabled people and Chernobyl victims. McCammond’s were racist.

Then along comes WhatsApp with its promise of encrypted communication which simply cannot be hacked and remains private to the grave. As if. As the officers of the Metropolitan Police were among the first to discover, when they were sacked for making disgusting and sexist jokes, encryption don’t mean a thing. Even using the delete function isn’t a guarantee of privacy of communication because people could’ve made screen shots of your messages. Spooks also no doubt have means of tracing them in cyberspace where nothing is ever really deleted. Lawyers representing bereaved Covid families are reportedly asking WhatsApp owners Meta to retrieve those messages apparently deleted en masse by Nicola Sturgeon and her ministers during the pandemic. We’ll see.

If you feel inclined to say something you don’t want everyone on the planet to hear, don’t say it. Just don’t. The UK government learned the hard way during the Covid Inquiry as the casual manner in which ministers discussed matters of life and death were revealed to the public. These were often in unauthorised disclosures such as the outing of the former Tory Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, by his biographer, Isabel Oakeshott. Fights with Rishi Sunak were exposed and even Hancock’s attempt to manage the story about his affair with colleague Gina Coladangelo. Toe curling stuff.

However the canny Scottish government it seems took a pre-emptive approach to cyber security. The Times reported last week that Scotland’s National Clinical Director, Professor Jason Leitch, had been deleting his WhatsApp messages at the end of every day during the two years or so he was at the front line in the Covid pandemic. He did not therefore have to comply with the Do not Destroy notice issued by the inquiries because they already had been. No one is suggesting Professor Leitch did anything improper and the Scottish Government has since denied the stories - though his messages have failed to materialise

The Sunday Mail has revealed that Nicola Sturgeon also deleted her emails apparently manually. This is also denied by the Scottish government which insisted irrelevantly that 13,000 documents had been given to the UK Covid Inquiry including hundreds of pages written by Nicola Sturgeon. At any rate the WhatsApp messages in question no longer appear to exist.

Lorna Slater, the Green Party minister, told the BBC Sunday show that she never used a phone to communicate. Instead she used a “device” which somehow did a similar job but not apparently in a manner that required her to reveal any messages so communicate.

The lead counsel to the inquiry, Jamie Dawson KC, said last week that hardly any of the WhatsApp messages they requested have been forthcoming. Only one minister responded and theirs were incomplete. The UK chair, Baroness Hallett, had asked the Scottish government about messages by by 70 individuals who had appeared on no fewer than 137 Covid-related message groups set up by Scottish ministers, civil servants and others during he pandemic. What happened to them?

It’s not our “culture” to use WhatsApp, said the Deputy First Minister, Shona Robison, last week as if electronic messaging is somehow alien to Scottish national identity. Why didn’t Boris Johnson think of that? If only the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, had used auto delete we might never have known he thought the government was “terrible tragic joke” or that “the real person in charge” was the PM’s wife Carrie. Nor would we have learned that the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, had wanted to”scare the pants off” the public by introducing draconian penalties for breaches of lockdown rules.

Of course, the UK government did initially try to withhold WhatsApp messages revealing informal discussions between ministers during the pandemic. For this, Rishi Sunak was accused of lack of transparency by opposition politicians, including the SNP. It was Boris Johnson who insisted that he wanted full disclosure and his political reputation was largely destroyed by what was revealed. It’s the curse of WhatsApp.

The Scottish government clearly didn’t relish the idea of becoming a national joke and so opted for pre-emptive deletion. Humza Yousaf has been deploying all manner of sophistry to deny this but it seems clear that Scottish ministers and civil servants had been deleting messages en masse. “All relevant” documentation has been handed over, said Yousaf at First Minister’s Question Time.

But as Aamer Anwar, the solicitor representing bereaved families, points out not be for the Scottish Government to decide what is and what isn’t relevant. He insists it is “inconceivable”, that Nicola Sturgeon and senior figures did not retain any electronic messages during the entire 2 years of the pandemic.

But the aversion to digital communication in the Scottish government seems to have come from the very top. Nicola Sturgeon, we were told at one point last week, didn’t even use email for anything important. It was suggested that she did her business on the phone or person-to-person. Decisions were taken by verbally by a small group in St Andrews House. All that remains is the official record of the decisions written after the event by civil servants.

Well that turns out to have been somewhere wide of the truth. Humza Yousaf is known to have used the messaging service in the past as have other ministers, including Nicola Sturgeon. So there is scepticism to put it mildly about this extreme paucity of WhatsApp traffic handed to the inquiry so far.

Moreover, Nicola Sturgeon announced as early August 2021 that there would be a Scottish inquiry into the handling of Covid in which “all communications” would be disclosed. Civil servants and ministers should have known from that date their communications should be preserved. They didn’t need to wait for the Do Not Destroy order.

Destroying messages can be a criminal offence under the Freedom of Information Act. Aamer Anwar is calling for the Covid Inquiry to issue a Section 21 Order to force disclosure of all redacted communications. But this looks like locking the stable door after the digital horse has bolted. Auto delete means we may never know what Scottish ministers and civil servants were really thinking about crucial issues during the pandemic, such as the decanting of elderly patients from hospital wards without proper testing.

How did ministers respond to the scandal of deaths in care homes? About the closure of schools which Nicola Sturgeon had initially said wasn't necessary? What discussions took place about face masks and their efficacy? It was from WhatsApp messages we learned that Boris Jason only made masks compulsory in schools because he couldn’t face another row with one Nicola Sturgeon. Were the pandemic policies of the Scottish government motivated by politics rather than “the science”?

The former First Minister has been widely praised for her handling of the pandemic even though the death rate in Scotland was no better than in the rest of the UK. Astute use of auto delete means we may never know if that praise was fully justified.

Will she get away with it? Has the Scottish government’s systematic deletion immunised them from the kind of withering scrutiny applied to Boris Johnson and co? To the former prime minister’s credit, he didn’t delete the embarrassing conversations Possibly he didn’t know how to since he is, like me, a bit of a technophobe. Maybe he wishes he had because it seems that by playing fast and loose with official secretary and the rules on document retention the Scottish government has got away Scot free.