When Nicola Sturgeon broke down at the UK Covid inquiry she was accused of shedding crocodile tears. They looked real enough to me, induced by having her motives impugned and of watching what was left of her legacy leach away under Jamie Dawson KC’s questioning.
The former first minister was willing to admit to errors of judgment. What she could not accept was that she had ever acted in anything other than what she believed to be the best interests of the people of Scotland.
This may be true. Sturgeon has long worn the air of a Sunday school teacher driven by civic duty and a compulsion to take the burdens of the world on her shoulders. But what her appearance in front of the inquiry exposed was the hubris that underpins that sense of moral purpose. Sturgeon was convinced that she, and she alone, was capable of effective decision-making. Her sleepless nights were less a testament to her dedication than evidence of an inability to delegate, which was the hallmark of her leadership and the opposite of good governance.
Sturgeon’s control freakery was visible in the setting up of “gold command” meetings to which only a chosen few were invited. This clique did not, in 2020, include the finance secretary, Kate Forbes, even when the economic impact of a potential circuit breaker was under discussion.
It was visible, too, in the deletion of her WhatsApp messages. Sturgeon, we know, called Boris Johnson “a fucking clown”, a sentiment few north of the border would disagree with. But for all their differences, she and her Westminster counterpart had in common an unwavering confidence in their own judgment. Sturgeon told Dawson it did not matter that the inquiry could not scrutinise her messages because all the “salient” information had been transferred to the “corporate record”. But the question of salience is subjective. So, too, are the parameters of the decision-making process. Some of the WhatsApp messages retrieved from other sources have shed light on the power dynamics that formed the backdrop to decision-making. We will never find out what the others might have revealed.
That the Scottish government had an issue with transparency is not news to anyone who has struggled to retrieve information through a freedom of information request; or who followed the parliamentary inquiry into the handling of harassment complaints against Alex Salmond, when it had to be pushed to hand over documents.
The Covid inquiry suggests the pandemic consolidated that culture. Indeed, if the jokey exchanges between Ken “plausible deniability” Thomson, the Scottish government’s then director general for strategy and external affairs, and Jason Leitch, Scotland’s national clinical director, are anything to go by, it was a source of amusement. When Thomson wrote, in a WhatsApp message seen by the inquiry, “The information you requested is not held centrally,” he was sending up the stock phrase used to keep details out of the public domain.
Sturgeon dismissed the conversation as a “lighthearted” discussion. But what about the fact that the “gold command” meetings were not minuted? Questioned by Dawson, Sturgeon denied these meetings were a means of bypassing cabinet. But without a paper trail, who can tell?
Sturgeon’s secrecy is doubly shocking when set against the apparent spirit of openness in which her public briefings were conducted. Day after day, she stood at her St Andrew’s House podium and set out her government’s thinking. Her clarity contrasted favourably with Johnson’s incoherence, and her approval ratings soared. Yet at the point when she promised the Channel 4 journalist Ciaran Jenkins that she would hand over all her WhatsApp messages to future inquiries, she had already deleted them. No wonder the bereaved feel betrayed.
Less convincing were Dawson’s attempts to show that Sturgeon had used the pandemic to advance the cause of independence. When he cast her divergence from UK policy as political grandstanding, she pointed out the UK government was often the outlier, with the three devolved nations aligned. When he accused her of “jumping the gun” by announcing a ban on mass gatherings before Johnson, she insisted her only regret was that she hadn’t done it sooner.
Dawson wasn’t for quitting. He asked Sturgeon about minutes that recorded the cabinet agreeing that “consideration should be given to restarting work on independence”. She said maybe so, but that work had not, in fact, restarted. He showed her an email in which the former deputy first minister John Swinney appeared to suggest failing to relax quarantine rules for those returning from Spain might lead Spain to block Scotland’s entry to the EU in the event of independence. This argument was so bizarre it was difficult to believe Swinney would ever have advanced it. And sure enough, the Scottish government later claimed it had been written by a civil servant.
On and on Dawson went until the interrogation itself began to feel politicised. He didn’t touch on one of the most urgent issues: the release of untested hospital patients into care homes. That was left to Kevin McCaffrey, representing the Scottish Covid Bereaved Group. Sturgeon answered as best she could, which is to say inadequately. Still, how difficult it must have been, in those early stages, to chart a course through all the conflicting evidence and advice. And how difficult – four years later – to have to account for your decisions in an adversarial process that sometimes seemed less interested in learning lessons than in bringing politicians down.
There is no excuse for Sturgeon’s “industrial-scale” WhatsApp deletion, but it was still possible to empathise with her when she said – through tears – that she sometimes wished she hadn’t been first minister when Covid struck. Not long ago it seemed her handling of the crisis would be the crowning moment of a glittering political career. But if there’s one thing this inquiry has demonstrated, it’s that leading the country through the pandemic was an impossible task, with nothing but ignominy at the end of it.
Dani Garavelli is a freelance journalist and columnist for the Herald
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