Covid Inquiry: Nicola Sturgeon calls Boris Johnson a 'f**cking clown' on WhatsApp as Humza Yousaf set to appear
Recap what happened at the UK Covid-19 Inquiry today with The Scotsman's politics team.
Key Events
We are now discussing what considerations the government had to also issue fixed penalty notices to 16 and 17 year olds at the start of the pandemic.
This was raised to 18, in line with the rest of the UK, on 27th May 2020.
Mr Yousaf said: “My recollection is that was changed pretty early on after regulations were passed in order to bring us in line with the UN rights of the child.
“It was raised to 18.
“The reason why it wasn’t given consideration earlier on is this was to act as a deterrent, it should capture as many people as possible to subsequently have the public health benefits.
“On reflection that was not the right calculation to make.”
Our Health Correspondent Joseph Anderson has his take on Humza Yousaf's first half at the UK Covid-19 Inquiry that you can read: https://www.scotsman.com/health/uk-covid-inquiry-humza-yousaf-apologises-unreservedly-for-scottish-governments-failure-to-hand-over-whatsapp-messages-4492946
We are now going back to a WhatsApp exchange between Mr Yousaf and National Clinical Director Jason Leitch, which was revealed to the inquiry on Tuesday.
Mr Yousaf asked him for guidance on wearing a face mask at a dinner he was attending in November 2021.
The lead counsel said what hope did the general public have of following the rules, if even the health secretary needed clarity on face mask rules.
He said: “As health secretary I quadrupled the rules because of the public scrutiny, particularly as health secretary.
“I was always under scrutiny to be seen to follow every piece of guidance, so it was not unusual for me to check in with Professor Leitch to double, triple and quadruple check my understanding of the guidance.
“I always wanted to make sure I was complying.”
However he said there were lessons to be learned on how complex the guidance was.
Calling the Scottish Police Federation “a disgrace”?
We’ve just been shown a text exchange between Mr Yousaf and former deputy first minister John Swinney where Mr Yousaf said: “They [Scottish Police Federation] are a disgrace.
“Right through this pandemic they’ve shown arrogance and retrograde thinking.”
Mr Yousaf admitted he didn’t always get along well with the police federation, and said he didn’t think they were supportive of the chief constable or police officers more generally on the enforcement of regulations.
Humza Yousaf's apology
Humza Yousaf has apologised “unreservedly” for the Scottish Government’s multiple failures to hand over WhatsApp messages to the UK Covid Inquiry.
Appearing at the UK Covid Inquiry in Edinburgh, the First Minister said “there is no excuse” for the deletion of WhatsApp messages relating to pandemic decision-making, adding “we should have done better”.
Jamie Dawson KC, the lead counsel for the UK Covid Inquiry, said Mr Yousaf appeared to be “a heavy user of WhatsApp”, and asked the First Minister if he used multiple personal phones rather than his government-issued phone during the pandemic - to which Mr Yousaf replied that he did.
Pushed on the deletion of WhatsApp messaging, Mr Yousaf said that the “salient points” of discussions relating to decisions were given to the corporate record by Ministers’ private offices, rather than the verbatim discussions.
Mr Yousaf added: “Not every sentence, full stop, or apostrophe will be recorded.”
Lead counsel Jamie Dawson KC says during the peak of the Omicron wave, eight per cent of people in Scotland were infected with Covid-19, compared to just one per cent in the first wave, which led to the same number of deaths in the third wave as in the first two waves.
He said hospitals became “overwhelmed”, many health boards needed to suspend non-urgent surgery, and the military was called in to assist.
He asks Mr Yousaf why hospitals were “allowed to be overwhelmed”.
Mr Yousaf said: “It wasn’t that they were allowed to be overwhelmed, it was a highly transmissible virus.
“We were opening up society because of the vaccination programme, there were other respiratory viruses, and it was hitting during the winter where people mingle more and go out to social events like Christmas parties and New Year functions.
“All that together made the pressure on the NHS extreme.”
Humza Yousaf now says he tended to go to National Clinical Director Professor Jason Leitch for advice and support during the pandemic.
Lead Counsel Jamie Dawson KC is now asking the First Minister why the Omicron wave was not classed as the “emergency phase” of the pandemic.
Mr Yousaf says the emergency phase was when the virus first came to the UK, and this particular wave was more classed as the recovery phase.
However, he said it was an emergency in relation to the health service, and said “it was a health crisis, for sure”, as winter 2021 was the most difficult winter in the history of the NHS.
Mr Yousaf says no one took the decision to cancel elective surgery “lightly”.
He said there was an understanding at government level and health board level that the decisions taken to protect people from coronavirus had an impact on other aspects of people’s health, including conditions “deteriorating” and having an adverse impact on quality of life.
In a message exchange between Humza Yousaf and Professor Jason Leitch over fan zones for the Euros, they say Nicola Sturgeon is “worried about losing the dressing room”.
They say cancelling fan zones would be “difficult” because people wanted to watch matches with their friends and family after waiting 23 years for Scotland to qualify for the Euros.
In the exchange Prof Leitch then said in relation to doing more testing: “As Trump said the problem with you public health idiots, if you do tests you will find disease.”
In the exchange they also say Nicola Sturgeon’s instincts are “not often wrong”, and ultimately the fan zones were allowed to go ahead.
The phrase “fingers crossed” appears regularly in messages between Mr Yousaf and Prof Leitch, which the counsel says could show the government was relying on “instinct and luck”.
Mr Yousaf said: “No, I was the health secretary, I was always going to be the guy in cabinet who pushed to go the hardest and fastest and to do more.
“That will be true of every health secretary across the UK, and that was always my position.
“There were on occasions in cabinet where I would be pushing harder, but ultimately it became a collective decision.
“The former first minister believed that if we had imposed restrictions during the Euros the public would just not accept it.
“That was dangerous for compliance - we would lose the public and have no impact on the virus.”
Humza Yousaf says the public’s patience with coronavirus restrictions was “wearing thin” a year into the pandemic.
He said: “It was more difficult to bring forward non-pharmaceutical interventions when we had a vaccination programme well underway and a testing system well established.
“We were facing an incredibly difficult set of circumstances.
“Having lived for over a year with the virus, people's patience with restrictions was wearing relatively thin.”
Humza Yousaf said it is fair to say he wanted greater steps to deal with the virus, but for financial reasons those steps were not taken.
A message exchange between Mr Yousaf and Prof Leitch says the public are no longer with the government.
It says: “We have asked a lot of the public, but we’ve lost the dressing room on this one.
“‘Save the NHS’ is not enough to stop people living their lives.”
We’ve now got a statement now from Aamer Anwar, the lead solicitor for the Scottish Covid-19 Bereaved group.
In it he says: “The First Minister Humza Yousaf needs to stop acting like a cheerleader for his former boss Nicola Sturgeon - he needs to take control, stop drip-feeding evidence to the public inquiry and handover all the private emails that ministers used to bypass scrutiny during the pandemic.
“Mr Yousaf must provide details on why he could retain his WhatsApps, whilst his former boss Ms Sturgeon was deleting them on an industrial scale along with Mr Swinney and Mr Leitch.”
On Liz Lloyd’s appearance at the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, Aamer Anwar, lead solicitor for the Scottish Covid Bereaved group, said: “The bereaved find it unbelievable there is no explanation from Liz Lloyd as to why during the critical period of the pandemic those WhatsApps do not exist, or why they disappeared.”
In his statement he added: “In Scotland, the bereaved genuinely believed Ms Sturgeon, Mr Yousaf and Mr Swinney when they told the families they would be front and centre, that they would be different [than the UK Government], and in Ms Sturgeon’s words that nothing would be off limits, including her WhatsApps.
“That belief is now shattered and it’s time for the word games to stop.
“Today the First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf had to answer to this inquiry - however in parliament at FMQs he once more offered an unreserved apology to the Covid bereaved over the handling of informal communications such as WhatsApps.
“Mr Yousaf went on to announce an external review into the handling of WhatsApps by the government.
“The Covid bereaved regard the First Minister’s statement as too little and too late, the damage has been done, the evidence has been destroyed, and this is shameful 11th hour scrambling to sort out the mess created by his government.”
That's Humza Yousaf's questioning session at the UK Covid-19 Inquiry over.
The inquiry sits in Edinburgh for another week.
On Monday it will hear from UK Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove and former Scottish health secretary Jeane Freeman.
On Tuesday it will hear from former deputy first minister John Swinney MSP and former finance secretary Kate Forbes MSP.
On Wednesday it will hear from former first minister Nicola Sturgeon MSP.
On Thursday the inquiry's Edinburgh leg will conclude and it will hear from UK Scottish Secretary Alister Jack MP.
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