UK Covid Inquiry: Alister Jack tells inquiry Nicola Sturgeon 'could cry from one eye if she wanted to'

Appearing before the UK Covid Inquiry in Edinburgh, Alister Jack took aim at Nicola Sturgeon’s appearance the previous day, and said the former first minister used the pandemic to further the cause of Scottish independence.

Scottish Secretary Alister Jack has confirmed he deleted “all” of his WhatsApp messages during the latter stages of the Covid pandemic in an admission that has sparked cries of “hypocrisy” from First Minister Humza Yousaf.

Appearing before the UK Covid Inquiry in Edinburgh on Thursday, Mr Jack said he had deleted “all” of his WhatsApp messages in November 2021 in an apparent bid to free up space on his phone.

He said: “I didn’t delete some of the message – I deleted all of them. I deleted WhatsApps from my mother, my wife, my friends – I mean I just deleted all my WhatsApps – because that created the capacity that allowed my phone to carry on.”

Alister Jack Secretary of State for Scotland of the United Kingdom arrives at the UK Covid inquiry at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

The Scottish Secretary said he previously had a phone with 64 gigabytes of storage, but now had 512GB of capacity on his current device.

“At the time, I didn’t think anything of it,” he said. Mr Jack told the inquiry he did not conduct “government by WhatsApp”, preferring to speak to colleagues on the phone or face to face.

The move was criticised within Conservative circles, with Scottish Tories leader Douglas Ross condemning Mr Jack’s actions.

With the Scottish Conservatives having heavily criticised former first minister Nicola Sturgeon for deleting her own WhatsApps during the pandemic, Mr Ross made clear he thought Mr Jack’s actions were also “wrong”.

“Alister Jack was wrong to delete his WhatsApp messages – he has apologised and he regrets it,” Mr Ross said.

Contrasting the Scottish Secretary with the former first minister, he added: “Nicola Sturgeon has not apologised for doing it. She has said she was right because she was following Government policy.

“That is a massive difference.”

Mr Yousaf accused Mr Ross of “hypocrisy” as he challenged him on the behaviour of both Mr Jack and former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson.

“It is astonishing that Douglas Ross demands investigations and reviews in relation to Nicola Sturgeon for not retaining her WhatsApps,” he said. “But his boss, his colleague, who deletes his WhatsApps, didn’t even think about the inquiry, that’s perfectly fine.

“There is one word for that. It is hypocrisy. And the people of Scotland can see right through Douglas Ross.”

The exchanges came as it was confirmed Ken Thomson, the Scottish Government’s director general for strategy and external affairs during the pandemic, had quit his role as chairman of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland’s (ICAS) regulatory board, citing “personal reasons”.

WhatsApp exchanges in which Mr Thomson instructed others to delete their messages during the pandemic had emerged during the first week of inquiry evidence.

Quizzed separately on other matters at the inquiry, Mr Jack said Ms Sturgeon “could cry from one eye if she wanted to” as he suggested the former first minister used the pandemic to underline the case for Scottish independence.

During her testimony, Ms Sturgeon repeatedly fought back tears as she claimed she took accusations she sought a different approach to the virus from the UK government to advance the cause of Scottish independence “very, very seriously”.

Ms Sturgeon said: “People will make their own judgments about me, about my government, about my decisions. But for as long as I live, I will carry the impact of these decisions, I will carry regret at the decisions and judgments I got wrong. But I will always know in my heart, and in my soul, that my instincts and my motivation was nothing other than trying to do the best in the face of this pandemic.”

Mr Jack said on Thursday: “I watched that evidence from yesterday and I didn’t believe it for a minute. I think Nicola Sturgeon could cry from one eye if she wanted to.”

He went on to say it was “inevitable there would be tensions” between the Scottish and UK governments given their different political positions on the union.

“The-then first minister saw her job as leader of a nationalist government to break up the UK,” Mr Jack said. “Devolution works very well, but works very well when both governments want to work together.

“But when one government wants to destroy the UK and destroy devolution, then there are tensions. Those tensions existed before the pandemic, during the pandemic and they exist now today.”

Ms Sturgeon was questioned at the inquiry about her government’s decision not to disclose an outbreak of Covid-19 at the Nike conference in Edinburgh in February 2020 to the public – a decision she said she would reverse in hindsight.

On Thursday, Mr Jack said the UK government was also not informed of the outbreak, despite both he and then UK health secretary Matt Hancock having spoken to the-then Scottish health secretary Jeane Freeman at the time.

He said Mr Hancock only discovered the outbreak when newspapers had contacted him.

Mr Yousaf later used First Minister’s Questions as a platform to defend his predecessor’s handling of Covid. He said despite “smears and insults” from opponents, he was “very pleased” Ms Sturgeon had been in charge during the “darkest days” of the pandemic.

Mr Yousaf accepted “wholeheartedly” that the Government’s policy on the retention of informal messages “clearly could have and should have been better” – adding this is why he has commissioned an external review into the matter.

But he defended his predecessor’s handling of the pandemic.

Mr Yousaf told MSPs: “When it comes to steering this country through some of its darkest days, I am very pleased we had Nicola Sturgeon in charge here of the Scottish Government as opposed to Boris Johnson. On the big calls, many of the decisions we made helped to save lives.”

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, however, insisted senior ministers, including Ms Sturgeon, had “subverted” the inquiry by deleting messages.