Being ‘not as bad as the Tories’ is now the height of SNP ambition - Brian Wilson

Shouting about Boris Johnson will fail to absolve those who bear responsibility

I suppose Humza Yousaf should be grateful for Michael Matheson’s £11,000 iPad bill and the tricky question of who should pay it. Without that diversion, Mr Yousaf’s claim of £17.98 for the purchase of hot water bottles might have received more attention.

While trying to get my head round a mentality which deems it appropriate for the public purse to fork out for hot water bottles, the even more depressing thought occurred. This guy is First Minister of Scotland.

It is the banal mediocrity which offends. I suppose if Mr Yousaf was challenged over hot water bottles, his defence would be: “Look at the Tories at Westminster. They build moats on expenses.”

This seems to be the pathetic level of ambition which the Scottish Government has settled for – to be less bad than the Tories. Forget the lofty peaks of a better nation. Just shout “Boris Johnson” and the case rests for SNP Ministers to get away with anything. No further evidence required.

It is politics played to the lowest common denominator – your lot is worse than our lot even though our lot is crap. For those well-intentioned souls who hoped devolution might lead to a new Scottish Enlightenment, it must be particularly painful to behold the dismal reality.

Certainly, “the Tories were worse” approach has been adopted by the great minds around Mr Yousaf for all matters relating to Covid and how the Scottish Government dealt with it. There is no failing that cannot be dismissed through comparison, rather than anything remotely positive or to be proud of.

I doubt if the bereaved – who just want the truth to emerge - cheered as wildly as the herd of dimwit Nationalist MSPs, banging their Holyrood desks in approval whenever the “Tories were worse” card was played, as it repeatedly was during this week’s First Minister’s Questions.

“I can say with total confidence”, averred Mr Yousaf, “that not a single Scottish Government minister said ‘let the bodies pile high’. That of course was said by none other than Boris Johnson”. How they applauded this put-down of Douglas Ross, who dared to probe the conduct of Scottish Ministers. What must bereaved families or NHS workers have made of the Yousaf pantomime diversions?

I bow to nobody in my longstanding contempt for Mr Johnson. However, he was totally irrelevant to the questions Mr Ross asked about the Scottish government’s failure to produce WhatsApp messages; an apparently systematic destruction of evidence by some key players and the patently misleading statements made to Holyrood by Mr Yousaf and his deputy, Shona Robison.

The idea these cease to be areas of legitimate and necessary inquiry on the grounds that Boris Johnson is alleged to have said something awful is itself insulting to those who simply want to know what went on inside the Scottish, as well as UK, government, in order to help bring closure to their loss and learn lessons for the future.

WhatsApp messages have revealed a great deal about the internal workings of Whitehall. If their Scottish counterparts have been irrevocably deleted in Edinburgh to pre-empt the same outcome, then Mr Yousaf can say nothing about their contents with “total confidence”. That is the enigma that Mr Yousaf continues to evade. It won’t go away.

Whatever his other offences, it was not Boris Johnson who emptied Scotland’s elderly into care homes without regard for whether they were already infected by Covid. If one piece of evidence – far less thousands – pertinent to the facts of that scandal alone has been wilfully destroyed, then shouting about Boris Johnson will fail to absolve those who bear responsibility.

Ministers in the Scottish Government, including the then First Minister, knew perfectly well that all communications, including WhatsApp messages, should have been retained throughout the Covid pandemic, for reasons that are now abundantly obvious. The question of whether this rule was followed is straightforward. Every answer so far has involved weasel-worded prevarication.

Mr Yousaf’s formulation about when the Scottish Government was asked to hand over the WhatsApp messages to the UK inquiry was risible. “I fully accept that the Scottish Government clearly interpreted the request from the inquiry in a way that was too narrow.” What on earth does that mean?

I heard that question being put to Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s Westminster leader, on radio yesterday after he used the same formulation. He replied: “I think the public will be very well aware that ‘too narrow’ means that you are looking at something too narrow in scope”. More meaningless gobbledegook - and then back to his rant about Westminster and Boris Johnson.

It is easy to say that Scotland deserves better, but it voted for these people and if we have learned one thing about the SNP’s behaviour in government, it is that once they set off down the road of deceit in order to avoid responsibility, they will use every tool at their disposal to see it through. Whether they get away with that over Covid remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, their calculation is not difficult to spot – public interest in something as obscure as WhatsApp message retention is unlikely to be sustained. Keep sowing confusion, they assume, and the detail will become lost. A more optimistic possibility is that they have been sussed by the electorate and every act of evasion further tarnishes an increasingly shoddy reputation.

The aftermath of Covid is a risky game to play politics with and the more which filters out about the Scottish Government’s behaviour – including destruction of evidence – the less interest there will be in Boris Johnson, about whom everyone has made up their minds anyway.

At some point Mr Yousaf should consider the possibility that honesty just might be the best policy for avoiding very hot water.