Nicola Sturgeon has been accused of “a shocking betrayal of the people of Scotland” as it emerged that the former first minister, along with other senior ministers and health officials, deleted all their WhatsApp messages related to the Covid pandemic.
The UK Covid Inquiry, taking evidence in Scotland, heard on Friday that Sturgeon “retained no messages whatsoever” while the national clinical director, Jason Leith, joked in a group chat that WhatsApp deletion was his “pre-bed ritual”.
Sturgeon had previously refused to confirm or deny allegations that she deleted the messages but insisted she was committed to “full transparency” about her conduct during the pandemic, adding: “I have nothing to hide.”
At the hearing in Edinburgh, Lesley Fraser, the director general corporate of the Scottish government, was questioned about details supplied by the Scottish government summarising ministers’ retention of messages and other forms of communication.
Counsel to the inquiry Jamie Dawson KC said: “Under the box ‘Nicola Sturgeon’, it says that messages were not retained, they were deleted in routine tidying up of inboxes or changes of phones, unable to retrieve messages.
“What that tends to suggest is at the time that request was made Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister of Scotland, had retained no messages whatsoever in connection with her management of the pandemic.”
Fraser responded: “That’s what that indicates to me.” She went on to say that Sturgeon would have worked with her private office and those instructions would be retained.
The documents also set out that messages sent by the former deputy first minister John Swinney were either manually deleted or he had used WhatsApp’s auto-delete function.
This is the first official confirmation that Sturgeon did not keep any of her pandemic messages and contradicts the commitment she made in August 2021 when she announced there would be a Scottish Covid inquiry and pledged to disclose her private messages in evidence.
Asked by Dawson if the Scottish government’s record retention policies “were simply not fit for purpose” during the pandemic, Fraser said she did not accept this but understood the “hurt and frustration” caused.
Aamer Anwar, the lawyer representing Covid bereaved families in Scotland, said the deletion of messages “can only be described as a cynical and pre-meditated decision” and that Sturgeon and others “must answer as to their motivation”.
He added that timing of deletion was crucial: “If auto-delete or manual deletion pre-existed the announcement of the public inquiry in August 2021, why was an order not then issued to stop any further deletion of WhatsApps?”
Anwar continued: “Sturgeon should be treated no differently to Boris Johnson, who failed to provide WhatsApps from the start of the pandemic, while the prime minister Rishi Sunak claims to have none at all.”
Also giving evidence, Ken Thomson, the former manager of the Covid coordination directorate of the Scottish government, said Sturgeon “did not take a decision in informal messaging” and that it was “rare” that she would message him at all.
There has been a furious response across the political spectrum to the evidence. The Scottish Labour deputy, Jackie Baille, described the news as “a shocking betrayal of the people of Scotland”, while the Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross, said Sturgeon and Swinney “have huge questions to answer over their conduct in the wake of this devastating revelation”.
