They can’t say it out loud, but they are trying to build a case against her...

IT was the most defiant we have seen Nicola Sturgeon on coronavirus, and the most unvarnished. Confronted at First Minister’s Questions on the scientific justification for keeping Scotland in lockdown longer than England, she said ‘you can look at all the data’ but, as a leader, ‘you still have to apply your judgment’.

It was a responsibility that weighed ‘very heavily right now’ but she had no other choice. ‘The science will inform those judgments,’ she added, ‘but it can’t make the decisions for you’.

Some of her opponents believe the First Minister was motivated by constitutional politics rather than scientific data in departing from the ‘four nations’ approach. They can’t say it out loud yet, but she knows they are trying to build a case against her. The pressure must be acute.

That is probably why we saw flashes of Sturgeon the Defiant yesterday. She was speaking over the heads of the opposition and making her case to the country.

Firmly, but without animus, she declared: ‘I am choosing. I am making the judgment – and I will stand accountable for it – that it is better now to err on the side of caution. If I get that judgment wrong, and these things are not certain, I would rather the price of getting that wrong is that people stay in lockdown for a few more days and that the price is not measured in unnecessary deaths.’

STURGEON spent most of FMQs on the defensive. Tory leader Jackson Carlaw’s line of questioning carried its hardest edge since the crisis began. His instinct that this was Not A Time For Politics was broadly correct but it was beginning to veer into Not A Time For Opposition.

Yesterday was a time for opposition and he brought up a Channel 4 interview with a worker from Highgate Care Home in Uddingston, Lanarkshire, where 22 residents have died. The worker said he still

Echo chamber: Sparse FMQs attendance hadn’t been tested and feared he and colleagues could be transmitting the virus to residents. He reckoned he should have been tested at the first sign of an outbreak.

‘First Minister,’ Carlaw asked, ‘why wasn’t he?’ Sturgeon said testing of care home staff and residents ‘is and should be the policy that is being pursued’, the conditional tense that crept in betraying perhaps her own doubts that this is the case.

Carlaw pointed out that Scotland was far behind the rest of the UK on making full use of testing capacity. The First Minister touted a new study suggesting there was under-reporting of care home deaths in England and Wales. And here came the flaw in her answer. ‘This is not some kind of competition,’ she told the Tory leader. ‘Any death toll in care homes or anywhere else is too high.’ A noble enough sentiment, but one that came exactly one minute and 56 seconds after she had remarked that Scotland was recording the full extent of care home deaths, ‘I think much more than in perhaps other parts of the UK’.

OLD political habits die hard, and Sturgeon’s impulse to compare NHS Scotland’s performance favourably with its English counterpart might be a harder dependency than most to kick, but it puts her in a bind. If she insists on contrasting her performance on reporting with that in England, she can’t avoid being held to that same standard when it comes to testing.

The 74-minute Q&A session was meant to give all MSPs, including those stuck at home, a chance to ask questions, but the proceedings were dominated by longer Qs and As from the leaders. The giant TVs for remote queries mostly sat idle.

Lib Dem MSP Liam McArthur did get a question in from his home in Orkney, while Graham Simpson’s robotic murmur made its way down from the Tory backbenches, sounding like it was being relayed through more satellites than McArthur’s link-up.