The real reason knuckleduster Nicola Sturgeon sprang a leak and started blubbing... she knows that she’s finished
WE had a Stan Laurel moment at the Covid inquiry when Nicola Sturgeon started blubbing. She didn’t quite remove her bowler hat and start scratching her head the way Stan would after being biffed by Oliver Hardy but it was a close-run thing. All simply because a barrister asked knuckleduster Nicola if she felt she was the right person to have been first minister of Scotland.
Seconds earlier she had been eagerly dishing out the ordure, pooh-poohing Boris Johnson’s qualifications and smirking that the man who won the 2019 election was ‘the wrong person to be prime minister full stop’. At this answer the inquiry’s Jamie Dawson KC cast a delicate fly and asked: ‘Did you consider yourself to be the right person to be first minister?’ That was all it took to bring on the waterworks.
The chin wobbled, her watering gaze fell and she quavered: ‘I was the first minister when the pandemic struck – there’s a large part of me wished that I hadn’t been, but I was, and I wanted to be the best first minister.’ Boo hoo hoo. Granite springs a leak.
Further lamentations followed when Mr Dawson, who had a nicely disguised asperity, wondered if Ms Sturgeon’s Scots Nats played lockdown for political advantage. This is hardly a new theory. Did the SNP pettily alter Edinburgh’s Covid policies from those of London simply so that it could parade the differences. Once again, Dawson KC had punctured Sturgeon’s dam.
‘I felt an overwhelming responsibility to do the best I could,’ she mewed. ‘So the idea that in those horrendous days I was thinking of a political opportunity, I find, well, it just isn’t true.’
And there was a repeat of the whimpering Stan routine with her mouth forming a rictus and a blinking back of tears. The Olivier awards will be asking for a demo tape. She was as good as Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter. All it required was Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto and a sepia wash and the inquiry’s breezy judge, Lady Hallett, could have sashayed up and down the aisles of the Edinburgh hearing room selling choc ices and Kia-Ora.
ALL the old Sturgeon tricks were on show: The head wobbles, the bouncing on toes as she affirmed the oath and the legalistic sentences in which you could almost hear the semi-colons.
She presents herself as a retired Mother of the Nation, but despite references to Gold Command meetings, private offices, ‘ underpinning rationales’, the use of ‘action’ as a verb and endless ‘salient points’, it all felt terribly Trumpton. For all the talk of mighty decisions this was Potemkin government. The money – root of any state’s power – was coming from London.
Mr Dawson was an improvement on his fruity London counterpart Hugo Keith KC, but the inquiry again busied itself naively with politics. The focus was on WhatsApp messages, some of which Ms Sturgeon grudgingly admitted she deleted (initially she tried the formula ‘I did not retain them’). Did her cabal try to keep others out of the loop? Of course, yet she was never going to admit that.
These lawyers approach politics in such a priggish way. Mr Dawson accused Ms Sturgeon of being political. What did he expect? She’s a politician. Boris Johnson’s fault during Covid, arguably, was that he wasn’t political enough.
The whole of lockdown was intensely political. Civil servants, NHS bosses, broadcasters and others created a vast socialist project in which medical protection was but one consideration. You will never hear the inquiry probing that because it hails from the same world.
Our local rescue-dog service is seeking a home for a Patterdale terrier and says the breed has ‘ an exceptionally high prey drive’. That’s a euphemism for ‘born killer’. The same is true of Nicola Sturgeon and is why she was such a vote winner.
But eventually even a Patterdale goes down a hole and meets its match and this has happened to her. She’s finished. That’s why she cried.