Sturgeon accused of Covid ‘crocodile tears’
Ex-first minister accused of shedding ‘crocodile tears’ during bruising day of testimony to Covid Inquiry
NICOLA STURGEON was accused of letting a “burning desire” for independence drive her response to the pandemic as she appeared at the Covid Inquiry yesterday.
The former first minister repeatedly welled up as she gave evidence at the inquiry, sitting in Edinburgh, but was accused by a bereaved relative of crying “crocodile tears”.
Jamie Dawson KC, the counsel for the inquiry, put it to her that it was a “matter of instinct” for her to “seek division” within the UK, including announcing different lockdown decisions than those applied in England. He asked her whether it was possible for her to take any decision without seeing it through the “prism of Scottish independence and your burning desire to achieve it”.
Ms Sturgeon rejected the claim, but minutes of a Scottish Cabinet meeting dated June 30 2020 showed SNP ministers “agreed that consideration be given to restarting work on independence and a referendum” using “the experience of the coronavirus crisis”.
She insisted this did not result in any action to restart a separation campaign and was merely a “comment”, but Lady Hallett, chairing the inquiry, intervened to note that the minutes stated this had been “agreed”.
Another email shown to the inquiry, dated July 2020, advised Ms Sturgeon and her ministers against imposing travel restrictions to Spain because “they will never approve EU membership for an independent Scotland as a result”. The inquiry also heard accusations that Ms Sturgeon had pursued a doomed “zero Covid” strategy because she wanted to be “the person that drove Covid out of Scotland”. She insisted the relaxation of the lockdown rules was slower in Scotland than in England.
In a conclusion during which Ms Sturgeon fought back tears, Mr Dawson quoted the bereaved wife of a Covid victim as saying that “hubris does not stop a pandemic”. He said: “The story of Covid in Scotland is the story of the hubris of Nicola Sturgeon, is it not?”
Addressing the bereaved, the former first minister said she was “deeply sorry” and insisted she “did my best”.
But she admitted that she had destroyed all her Whatsapp messages from the pandemic, and had already started doing so when she promised in August 2021 that they would all be handed to the inquiry.
Pamela Thomas, who lost her brother to Covid, told reporters outside the inquiry: “Crocodile tears aren’t washing with me. If there is any tools available to my solicitors or the inquiry with regards to any criminal activity that took place, I would like them to use them all.”
NICOLA STURGEON broke down in tears as she finally admitted deleting Whatsapp messages from her time leading Scotland in the pandemic.
In a bruising day of evidence, the former first minister told the Covid Inquiry that she had started destroying her Whatsapp messages despite promising Scots they would all be handed over.
Ms Sturgeon said she “didn’t retain” any of the messages before she was directly challenged on whether she had actively deleted them, being forced to admit that she had done so.
She repeatedly broke down during questioning by Jamie Dawson KC, the counsel for the inquiry, and was accused of shedding “crocodile tears” by bereaved families.
In the first of a number of occasions when she became emotional, she admitted a “large part of her” wishes she had not been in power in Scotland when the pandemic struck.
The revelations came as she defended her stance on independence, insisting her “burning desire” for Scotland to break free of Westminster played no role in her lockdown decision-making.
She also admitted she wished she had locked the country down sooner. Here are the key moments from her evidence:
Tears flow
Ms Sturgeon became emotional as she admitted a “large part of her” wished she had not been in power when the pandemic hit. Her voice broke and she appeared to wipe away tears as she said it was for others to judge how well she had performed.
“I was the first minister when the pandemic struck,” she said. “There’s a large part of me that wishes that I hadn’t been. But I was.
“And I wanted to be the best first minister I could be during that period. It’s for others to judge the extent to which I succeeded.”
Ms Sturgeon appeared on the brink of breaking down shortly after being asked about Boris Johnson. She acknowledged she did not think he was the right person to be prime minister in the crisis, but she denied this meant she believed she was “precisely the right first minister for the job”.
Previous hearings in the Edinburgh leg of the UK inquiry have shown she privately referred to Mr Johnson as a “f------ clown”.
She also appeared upset as she denied looking to use the pandemic for political gain. “My memories of the early part of 2020, in terms of how I was feeling and thinking and the emotions that I was experiencing, was first fear at what might be about to unfold and confront the country.
“At times, and I think, you know, you’ve seen snippets perhaps, you know, the sort of human side of being a leader ... perhaps more than anything I felt an overwhelming responsibility to do the best I could ... so, the idea that in those horrendous days, weeks, I was thinking of a political opportunity I find, well, it just wasn’t true”.
Whatsapp messages
Ms Sturgeon eventually admitted to deleting all her Whatsapps from the pandemic and apologised if the public felt misled by her public pledge to hand over all her messages to the inquiry.
After months of obfuscation, she said she “didn’t retain” any of the messages. She was then challenged directly on whether she actively deleted them. “Yes,” she eventually told Mr Dawson.
She conceded she had already started destroying them when she gave an unequivocal pledge to make them available to the UK and Scottish public inquiries during a televised news conference in August 2021.
In a tense exchange, she insisted what she meant to promise on television was that the substance of anything relevant in her messages would be transferred to the Scottish Government’s official record. She apologised if this was not “clear” when she made the pledge and insisted she had not seen a legal notice handed to the Scottish Government in August 2021, which warned against the destruction of material relevant to the inquiry.
While Ms Sturgeon tried to downplay her use of Whatsapp, the inquiry heard she used the informal messaging site to contact figures, including Humza Yousaf, then her health secretary, Liz Lloyd, her chief of staff, John Swinney, her deputy first minister and Jeane Freeman, a former health secretary.
In addition, he said she had contacted Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of Wales, and Michelle O’neill, then the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland. Ms Sturgeon accepted she had done so but insisted “those messages would have been extremely limited”.
However, despite her claims that decisions were not made on Whatsapp, messages were shown of Ms Sturgeon engaging in detailed discussions with Ms Lloyd about restrictions for the hospitality industry. Writing on Oct 27 2020, Ms Sturgeon complained she was having a “crisis of confidence” and had not slept. After eventually deciding she should “probably” stick with a 6pm closing time, she said: “It’s all so random.”
The inquiry was previously shown an exchange from August 2020 between Ken Thomson, a senior civil servant who was then manager of the Covid directorate, and other senior colleagues. Mr Thomson told the others: “Just to remind you (seriously) this is discoverable under FOI [freedom of information]. Know where the ‘clear chat’ button is …”.
He later added: “Plausible deniability is my middle name. Now clear it again!” He also said “this information you requested is not held centrally”, a stock phrase the Scottish Government uses when refusing FOI requests.
Ms Sturgeon said she interpreted the exchange as “light-hearted”, noting it did not appear to make any decisions on the Covid response.
Asked whether Mr Thomson’s remark about information not being held centrally was “an excuse officials trotted out in response to FOI requests”, she agreed that was “an interpretation that can be out on it”.
She added: “All the public servants are people of the utmost integrity and at this point and throughout the pandemic they were public servants working in a dedicated fashion … above and beyond the call of duty.”
Independence
Ms Sturgeon admitted she had a “burning desire” for Scotland to become an independent nation but she repeatedly insisted that had played no role in her decisions. However, she was confronted with evidence which called this into question.
Among the most damning exchanges was an email sent from Mr Swinney’s office, discussing travel corridors in July of 2020. The message raised serious concerns that should Spain not be added to an exemptions list it could scupper an independent Scotland’s application to join the EU.
It is often claimed that Spain could block Scotland’s accession to the EU
because of a fear that doing so would provide a boost to its own separatist movements. The email read: “It won’t matter how much ministers might justify it on health grounds, the Spanish Government would conclude it is entirely political; they won’t forget; there is a real possibility they will never approve EU membership for an independent Scotland as a result.”
However, Ms Sturgeon denied that a possible route to EU membership for an independent Scotland had any bearing on her thinking. She argued that if this was the case, Spain would never have been added to the list in the first place.
Ms Sturgeon was also interrogated about a Cabinet paper from June 2020 which showed that SNP ministers agreed to consider “restarting work on independence and a referendum”, with the case updated with the “experience of the coronavirus crisis”.
Ms Sturgeon insisted that regardless of what the minute says, her government did not begin campaigning for independence at that stage.
She said she had learnt “for a fact” that she had been able to separate her
constitutional views from Covid decision-making.
“I don’t think in my entire life have I ever thought less about politics generally and independence in particular than I did during those early stages of the pandemic,” she said.
“People will judge for better or worse the decisions my government took. None of those decisions were influenced in any way by political considerations or trying to gain an advantage for the cause of independence.”
Earlier lockdown
Not locking down up to two weeks earlier is one of Ms Sturgeon’s main regrets, she told the Covid Inquiry. While she repeatedly said she made general mistakes, not locking down sooner was one of the few specific examples she gave of an action she regretted.
She said: “Of the many regrets I have, probably chief of those is that we didn’t lock down a week, two weeks, earlier than we did.”
The Scottish Government became aware that Covid 19 was something to
“be very worried about” in late January 2020, the inquiry heard, with the Cabinet discussing the virus for the first time on Feb 4 that year.
Ms Sturgeon also told the inquiry it was “not unreasonable” to keep information about an early outbreak at a Nike conference in Edinburgh from the public, on the advice of Catherine Calderwood, the then chief medical officer, although she later said she would have “gone the other way”.
She denied the suggestion by Mr Dawson that the Scottish Government was “asleep at the wheel” after evidence showed that Covid was listed under “any other business” in a Cabinet meeting as late as February 2020.
Defending Kate Forbes with an attack on Humza Yousaf
Ms Sturgeon explained a Cabinet row with Mr Yousaf, who would succeed her as First Minister, by claiming she was standing up for his rival Kate Forbes, the finance secretary.
Mr Yousaf provoked anger from Ms Sturgeon at a Cabinet meeting in December 2021 when he said he had
found £100 million from his health budget which could help pay to compensate businesses for additional restrictions.
Mr Yousaf described taking “a hell of a bullet” at the meeting, while Jason Leitch, the national clinical director, privately described Ms Sturgeon’s behaviour as “absolutely ridiculous”.
However, Ms Sturgeon said that she had been angered by Mr Yousaf springing the offer of an extra £100 million on colleagues, after Ms Forbes, her finance secretary, “diligently” attempted to find more cash but came up with nothing.
“I was not particularly happy about it,” she admitted. “A couple of weeks before that, Mr Yousaf had said he may be able to find some money, and my response was ‘speak to Kate’. It appeared he hadn’t done so.
“It was more on behalf of Ms Forbes, as I felt it did a disservice to her and the very professional job she had done.”
Ms Sturgeon denied that the exchange was indicative of a culture in which she did not “take kindly” to ministers making unsolicited suggestions or challenging her at Cabinet meetings.