The UK’s Covid Inquiry has trundled into Scotland and the media lined up for Nicola Sturgeon’s evidence on January 31.

At one point, she wiped a tear from her eye, which gave the Daily Mail Scotland a front-page headline that read like a bad Victorian children’s story. In fact, she got through the six-hour ordeal well – as is shown by the lack of subsequent Gotcha headlines. But there did seem to be a bit of attempted humbling going on. She was treated more like the accused than as a respected public servant. 

Sturgeon was on the stand for several hours. When she became emotional, she was not given a moment to compose herself.

Having prepared carefully for the hearing, Sturgeon was able to call to mind specific dates and documents. She did not appear to have access to any notes or to the bundle of documents that the court had before it and when she asked KC Jamie Dawson if he would call items up, he simply ignored her requests and made no response, ploughing on with his own agenda.

“Did you believe her?”

And when the next witness after Sturgeon took the stand, Secretary of State for Scotland Alister Jack,  KC Dawson asked him to give his opinion of Sturgeon’s obvious emotion during her evidence.  Dawson did the tabloid hack’s trick of putting his own words into someone else’s mouth on the basis of them answering “yes” to a question. 

“She described that despite the fact that she believed in Scottish independence to her very core, she was in this medical emergency able to put aside those political convictions and prioritise the health and safety of the people of Scotland. Did your pre-existing assumption about her political convictions result in you failing to believe she could do that?”

Jack gave a typical response, at once nasty and somewhat incoherent, saying: “I didn’t believe it for one moment…I thought she could cry from one eye if she wanted to.”

But why was Jack effectively asked if he thought Sturgeon was lying under oath? What kind of question is that? It seemed like an abuse of the privilege of the inquiry. 

Bringing up Brexit 

Dawson at one point jumped to defend the UK government over Brexit. The UK chose to carry on with that despite the pandemic. As part of Westminster’s Brexit power grab it pushed through the Internal Markets Act, which took powers away from the Scottish Parliament and undermined the devolution settlement. The Scottish government and Sturgeon were accused of “politicising the pandemic” over a response it made to this – even though this was clearly a political matter. 

There was a minuted agreement at a Scottish Cabinet meeting about restarting work on independence “after EU exit”. Sturgeon pointed out that this was in response to a Brexit paper that they were looking at, not a Covid paper. The UK government had declined to pause that in the way the Scottish Government had paused work on independence. 

Sturgeon said: “I think we also requested at that time that the UK Government did likewise around the constitutional project of Brexit, and that was declined. The UK Government never suspended any of its work on Brexit. One of the reactive things that the Scottish Government officials had to do during Covid was respond to consultation on the Internal Market Act, for example.”

Dawson came right back with a defence of the UK Government’s Brexit position: “It was the transition period for Brexit, wasn’t it, in 2020, so work was required on that?” Sturgeon replied drily: “ I think that is perhaps a matter of opinion rather than fact.”

Petty Political

Sturgeon was questioned extensively about things that seemed pretty petty. For example, did the public health professor Devi Sridhar send over emails to Sturgeon’s SNP email address? 

Given that the emails in question were scientific papers that Sridhar was writing about the progress of the pandemic, which were widely circulated, does it matter? Sturgeon confessed to reading extensively, sometimes through the night, in her efforts to understand what was unfolding. Sridhar was sending over extra homework. 

Did Sturgeon give Humza Yousaf a hard time at a cabinet meeting when out of the blue he offered to take £100 million out of the health budget and give it to business? Why did Sturgeon take as much 24 hours to get rid of Catherine Calderwood after she broke lockdown rules? Did she buy a couple of cheap mobile phones to divert office lines to for staff working from home?

Sturgeon’s usual practice was to delete WhatsApps

Where were her WhatsApp messages? Sturgeon explained several times that she had a practice of deleting WhatsApp messages daily, which she evidently regards as good practice. She said that the thinking that led to decisions about how to handle the pandemic measures were to be found minuted in the official records which run to thousands of pages. 

Sturgeon was entitled to be believed on this point. There is no evidence that this was not her usual practice. 

The search for a flash of knickers

But instead of looking at the thousands of pages of documents on the record in order to understand how and why important decisions were made, Dawson focused on a few WhatsApps which have survived and contain remarks that might be seen as embarrassing – like one anguished-sounding message to the civil servant Liz Lloyd. Sent from the ministerial car at 7am on the way to a cabinet meeting, Sturgeon confessed in it that she hadn’t slept much and was having difficulty with some of the rules around tier two and three “It all seems so random”.

That’s true – those rules did seem bafflingly random at the time. The question that seemed to arise from this would be: ‘Was having different tiers a good idea or not?’ But the inquiry didn’t seem to want to engage with that. Sturgeon was not asked to reflect with hindsight on the usefulness of tiers as a public health measure. Dawson went insistently on with his search for Nicola’s secret. 

Decisions Sturgeon discussed publicly every day

But there really weren’t any secrets to be found. As Sturgeon pointed out, these were decisions that she discussed every day in her briefings that were watched by most of the population of Scotland at one time or another.

Many of us will remember the lengthy Q and A sessions she had with journalists after these briefings.  My late mother Sandra was among the many immunocompromised and elderly folk who found great solace in watching those discussions and getting an insight into the balance of risks that led to the difficult decisions that were being taken.

Basic Instinct

Nicola Sturgeon “governed by instinct,” Dawson alleged. The evidence for this was that she said at one point that her instinct would be to cancel the fan zone at the Euros in Glasgow. The answer was – well actually she didn’t cancel the fanzone because medical advice was to keep it open so No.

Conclusion

Many people who watched or read the transcript of Nicola Sturgeon’s evidence to the Covid Inquiry may have been reminded of just what a good First Minister she was at that time. She can do the detail. She is smart, empathetic and forthright. Her engagement with the people of Scotland brought comfort to many in a difficult time. 

Did Sturgeon and the Scottish Government get every call right? Absolutely not – but she worked hard and honestly at a difficult time and she deserves to be treated with respect.

First published on the author’s A Letter from Scotland Substack

Other views: Alison Rowat, Buyer’s remorse, The Herald; Dani Garavelli, Of course Sturgeon cried, Guardian;