Humza Yousaf has apologised “unreservedly” to both the UK Covid inquiry and to people bereaved by the pandemic for the Scottish government’s failures to hand over WhatsApp messages relating to the handling of the crisis.
“There’s no excuse for it. We should have done better,” Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, told the inquiry on Thursday.
A tense day of evidence at the inquiry, which is sitting in Edinburgh for a second week, revealed that the former first minister Nicola Sturgeon had described Boris Johnson as “a fucking clown” as he broadcast to the nation to announce a second Covid lockdown in October 2020.
She told her chief of staff: “His utter incompetence in every sense is now offending me on behalf of politicians everywhere.”
Following a succession of revelations about how senior Scottish ministers and officials regularly deleted informal messages and exhibited apparent disdain for freedom of information rules, Yousaf also told Jamie Dawson KC, lead counsel for the inquiry, that he had instructed an externally-led review into the use of WhatsApp and other unofficial technology in the Scottish government.
His announcement came as evidence taken earlier in the day revealed that, despite consistent Scottish government denials, decisions about pandemic restrictions and strategy did appear to have been made using WhatsApp, in seeming contradiction of Sturgeon’s insistence that she did not conduct her government’s Covid response through informal messaging.
On Thursday morning the inquiry was shown exchanges between Sturgeon and Liz Lloyd, who served as her chief of staff and strategic adviser between 2015 and 2023, in which Sturgeon described the former UK prime minister as “a fucking clown”.
Sturgeon went on the dismiss the UK government’s Covid communications strategy as “awful … we’re not perfect but we don’t get nearly enough credit for how much better than them we are”.
Lloyd, who described herself as Sturgeon’s “thought partner”, was shown several exchanges, including one regarding the numbers allowed to attend weddings and another suggesting “a good old-fashioned rammy [quarrel]” with the UK government over furlough policy.
There was a furious response last week from bereaved families and opposition politicians when the inquiry heard that Sturgeon “retained no messages whatsoever”, while Scotland’s national clinical director, Jason Leitch, joked in a group chat that WhatsApp deletion was his “pre-bed ritual”.
Sturgeon has since clarified that the inquiry does have messages relating to the pandemic, although they were not retained on her device, and has said: “To be clear, I conducted the Covid response through formal processes from my office in St Andrew’s House, not through WhatsApp or any other informal messaging platform.”
Questioning Yousaf about how decisions were made at that time, Dawson asked him if the Scottish cabinet was a decision-ratifying rather than decision-making body.
Yousaf said he disagreed with that assessment, but also spoke to concerns raised in his initial written statement that decisions made by Sturgeon were not “cascaded” to the rest of the cabinet.
He said the pandemic had not been “not normal times” but that there were occasions when Sturgeon and her “gold command”, a select group of senior advisers and ministers, made often time-sensitive decisions that were not discussed at cabinet level.
Asked by Dawson if it was correct that these gold command meetings were not minuted, Yousaf said it was “my understanding that they should have been”.
Yousaf, who has provided the inquiry with his own WhatsApp messages, was asked about an exchange with Leitch that took place on his first day in his role as health secretary. Leitch referred to a meeting and “some FM ‘keep it small’ shenanigans as always – she actually wants none of us”.
Dawson asked if this was an example of Sturgeon wanting to make decisions alone, but Yousaf said this was a “classic example of Jason over-speaking”.
Yousaf was also asked about a WhatsApp exchange which Leitch was challenged on earlier this week, where he asked whether he needed to wear a face mask at an indoor dinner event when he was standing up talking to other guests. Leitch had advised Yousaf to “have a drink in your hands at all times, then you’re exempt”.
But Yousaf denied that he had been asking Leitch for “a workaround”. He told Dawson: “I was asking for clarification on how to comply.”
