Covid Inquiry: Forget Nicola Sturgeon's WhatsApp swearing. We should focus on what really matters – Christine Jardine

Key questions the Covid Inquiry must answer centre on the big decisions about lockdown and who decided to discharge hospital patients into care homes without testing them for the virus

Well don’t I feel quite the numpty. It’s less than a year since, on the day of her resignation, I paid tribute to Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership through the pandemic and the way in which she had held us together. Now that some of her WhatsApp messages from the time have been revealed I feel, what was that phrase she used? Something about a clown?

Turns out our former First Minister has quite the way with words, a few unrepeatable, and all of them throwing her period in office into a fresh, new and not entirely complimentary light. Accepting the pressures of the time, of course. The beauty, or in this case danger, of WhatsApp messages sent from a position of false security and mistaken sense of privacy, is that they reveal the true, unmasked personality of the sender.

But while the language revealed at the Covid Inquiry may offer a wealth of material for opponents and satirists alike, I doubt that they will provide the answers we are all seeking. Or the respect so many of us still need. Nowhere in anything produced so far is there comfort for the families still grieving, or those still coping with long Covid, that the leadership at Holyrood was doing as much as it could for them. Or any lessons we might use to help us through the next pandemic that comes along.

Nicola Sturgeon was right to call Boris Johnson a clown, but there may have been more than one (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

And that, surely, is what the inquiry should be about. Forget Nicola’s sweary outbursts. Put aside the Boris posturing and ill-informed pronouncements. Where in all the chat, messages, reports and exchanges are the answer to the questions: what could we have done better and how do we avoid this happening again?

I do not really care what Nicola called Boris, or anyone else for that matter, and so what if she has a vocabulary that seems to shock even the most hardened souls. I want to know why our governments did what they did. Who made the decisions about lockdown or isolating families from loved ones in care homes? And who judged that it was OK to discharge people into those same care homes who might be infectious?

One specific piece of information that seems to have been tossed out there and then dismissed is the suggestion that this virus was, in fact, manmade. In China. But that, it seems, is not the remit of the inquiry and, in any case, has been buried under an avalanche of irrelevant but gossip-worthy trash.

It’s time, still, to get serious. This was a period in time which tore the heart out of families, destroyed businesses and ruined lives. Our NHS was stretched beyond breaking point but because of the diligence and the love of the institution by those who sustain it and use it, it survived. Our communities pulled together in a way that we should all be proud of.

So please can we all focus on what we need to know, the answers we crave and helping families find the closure they deserve? Although, one thing the First Minister may have been right about is that clown she mentioned. But I think there might have been more than one.

Christine Jardine is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West