The tracks of my tears

Nicola Sturgeon admitted misleading the public and parliament over the mass deletion of messages.

Before Nicola Sturgeon took the stand before the UK Covid Inquiry in Edinburgh there had been much cynical speculation on social media about exactly when she would “tear up” for the bulletins. True to form, she choked visibly during the morning session of the inquest. It was after she had condemned Boris Johnson for being the wrong person “full stop” to be PM during Covid. She, on the other hand, “just wanted to be the best First Minister I could be. Whether I succeeded is for others to judge”.

Indeed, and that’s exactly what they did. Jamie Dawson KC, the lead advocate for the Covid Inquiry, was unmoved by her tears and proceeded to judge her harshly in a coruscating seven hours of questioning in which he repeatedly accused her of using the pandemic for political purposes, to further the cause of independence, and misleading the public and parliament about her retention of official records, especially WhatsApps.

She won the battle for the airwaves however. Her emotional spasm led the BBC’s coverage on the One O’Clock News and the abiding image in the press is of the former First Minister wiping away a tear. “I believe she feels insulted”, opined a BBC Scotland political correspondent, “she wonders if her critics have given her enough credit for how challenging a job it was.” I’m sure we all felt her pain.

Now, I do not know whether or not Nicola Sturgeon’s emotional moment was contrived. I suspect she was telling the truth when she said that at times she was “overwhelmed” and wished she had not been First Minister when the pandemic struck. However, is a most disciplined politician always knows when to where to control her emotions and when, perhaps, to allow them a little more latitude. At any rate the personal is political, as her feminist admirers insist, and this was a highly political moment of personal revelation.

Her emotional moment largely eclipsed her earlier confession that she had indeed misled the public and parliament about deleting her WhatsApp messages, or indeed not retaining minutes from the so called “Gold Command Group”, a kind of inner cabinet that apparently drove policy during the pandemic. She had told Channel 4 News in August 2021 that she would provide all her WhatsApps, emails and other informal messaging to the Covid Inquiry. Indeed, she had said she would have no alternative but to do so. In the event, she deleted them.

Except that Ms Sturgeon insisted that “deletion” was the wrong word and implied that she “hadn’t bothered” to keep a proper record of policy discussions. She insisted that anything relevant was recorded elsewhere. All she had done, she said, was “not retain” her WhatsApp, “in line with the guidance I had always been given”. A fine distinction. Jamie Dawson KC had little time for her semantic quibbling. In the end, after much obfuscation, he put it to her that she had simply deleted the messages. “Yes”, she replied flatly. But apology there was none. The nearest she got was an attempt to qualify her unequivocal promise on Channel 4, and to the pandemic bereaved, to provide all communication, WhatsApps included. “I apologise if that answer [on Channel 4] was not clear” – a classic non-apology apology. He meaning was crystal clear. Yet it seems even then she had been deleting messages daily.

Alex Salmond took to the airwaves to contest her claim that she was following Scottish government policy. He knew of no such policy in the time he was First Minister. Neither did Sturgeon’s chief of staff, Liz Lloyd or ministers like the former health secretary, Jeane Freeman have any knowledge of the mass deletion policy. It was a policy kept on a need to know basis.

As it happens, Nicola Sturgeon has produced WhatsApp messages in the past, not least during the Salmond inquiry Holyrood inquiry in 2020 when she read out in a TV interview instant communications she had exchanged with Alex Salmond prior to the sex harassment allegations against him in 2018. There are many questions to be asked about this deletion policy and when it started - not least that nothing seems to remain of communications between Sturgeon and her chief of staff Liz Lloyd, in the months leading up to the conclusion of the Salmond trial in March 2020. One can only wonder what they were saying to each other about Salmond’s acquittal, by a jury, of the many charges levelled by Scottish government officials and senior members of the SNP.

Much of Nicola Sturgeon’s evidence turned on the meaning of words, and her own insistence that they must mean whatever she says they mean. She went on to argue that a cabinet minute from June 2020 about relaunching the independence campaign “with arguments reflecting experience of the coronavirus crisis” did not mean what it said. Indeed she denied all knowledge of the cabinet discussion about the Indyref and Covid. It must have been “someone else’s comment”. It certainly wasn’t acted upon, she insisted. But Baroness Hallett intervened to point out that it had been “agreed” by cabinet and therefore the expectation would have been that it would be actioned. Where was the discussion about this before the decision was taken?

Her insistence throughout the session was that the WhatsApps would contain nothing of importance since all “relevant” discussion of policy was put on the official record though in this case it clearly was not. She said that she never discussed anything of significance on instant messaging which she rarely used. Sturgeon was provided with several examples of where policy was discussed on WhatsApp, for example on pub opening times, which contradicted this assertion. She had even discussed with Liz Lloyd, her chief of staff, the prospects for a “good old fashioned rammy” with Westminster.

Similarly her insistence that politics never entered her head during the pandemic was challenged by Jamie Dawson. He put it to her that her decisions were invariably taken through the “prism” of Scottish independence. Her aim had been to show that Scotland could do it better than Westminster and that the Union was an obstacle to coping with the pandemic. This generated a further lachrymose moment. ”The idea that those horrendous days, weeks, I was thinking of a political opportunity, I find… well, it just wasn’t true.’

Yet, the “Zero Covid” affair suggests otherwise. In the summer of 2020, under the guidance of her favourite adviser, Professor Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh University, Surgeon promoted the idea that Scotland was well on the road to beating Covid and could “eliminate” the virus. This idea was never entertained even by her own specially convened Covid advisory group yet it dominated her discourse during those crucial months.

The former First Minister went into a lengthy digression on how “elimination” did not mean “eradication” and that Zero Covid was actually a policy of “maximum suppression”. This failed to convince Baroness Hallett who intervened again to point out that elimination and eradication mean the same thing. Indeed they do. But Ms Sturgeon continued to insist that they were totally different.

Professor Sridhar has only recently accepted that she was wrong about Zero Covid but Nicola Sturgeon is unable to accept even that it was her policy and sought refuge in semantics. This was probably the most unconvincing part of her evidence after her similar word play over deleting her WhatsApps. She also insisted that Scotland had a lower excess death rate than England which is simply untrue.

The point of the elimination strategy was to subliminally suggest that in some way the connection to the UK was toxic and that if Scotland were independent it would have been able to halt the pandemic at the border. Even the New Scientist endorsed this fantasy, claiming in the summer of 2020 that “Scotland could have “eliminated the coronavirus – if it weren’t for England”. Some nationalist extremists in hazmat suits posted themselves at the border urging English travellers to turn back. It was probably the worst example of pandemic politicisation, which let’s face it, was happening on both sides of the border.

There was no equivocation about the failures to protect elderly people decanted from NHS hospitals without proper testing. She said, with feeling, that she was “deeply regrets” the lack of testing and carries the burden with her every day. She wished she could “turn the clock back and do things that would have reduced the loss of life in care homes” but added that it probably wouldn’t have prevented deaths since people in hospitals were still at risk.

Nicola Sturgeon is an expert communicator, who rarely puts a foot wrong. She came to the Covid inquiry intending to put matters to rest over her the deletion of her Covid messages, to rebut allegations that she had politicised the pandemic and finally to claim, all evidence to the contrary, that the Scottish Covid performance had indeed better than that in England. In the event, after being subjected to some of the most rigorous forensic examination she has ever experienced, she failed.

The former First Minister now stands accused of breaking the ministerial code and breaching the Freedom of Information Act. Her playing with words was cruelly exposed by Jamie Dawson’s forensic questioning. No reasonable person could believe that Nicola Sturgeon, who has dedicated her life to the cause of independence, somehow parked this passion during Covid. At the end of the day this most controlled and disciplined politician was visibly breaking down. There was nothing phoney about that.