Euan McColm: If Nicola Sturgeon was still First Minister there would be legitimate calls for her to quit over WhatsApps

No amount of spin gets former First Minister off the hook and we should be grateful she is no longer in power

Were Nicola Sturgeon still Scotland’s serving First Minister, she’d today be facing entirely legitimate calls for her resignation. Opposition leaders would be united in their verdict that she was unfit for office. Even her most loyal lieutenants would, surely, be asking themselves whether she’d taken them for a ride.

The news that Sturgeon – despite a public promise in August 2021 that she would make available to the Covid Public Inquiry all of her digital communications sent and received during the pandemic – had deleted months of WhatsApp messages is profoundly shocking. Once seen as a hero of the coronavirus crisis, Sturgeon now stands fairly accused of betraying every single Scot impacted by it.

There is, I’m afraid, no plausible excuse for the actions of the former First Minister and other senior government figures who actively deleted WhatsApp messages despite knowing that the current public inquiry would demand copies of their communication records.

On Friday, a hearing of the UK-wide Covid inquiry held in Edinburgh heard that Sturgeon and the man who served as her deputy First Minister, John Swinney, had deleted their WhatsApp messages from the time of the pandemic. National clinical director Jason Leitch – the medical expert who stood alongside Sturgeon during many of her daily coronavirus updates – told other senior officials that deletion of WhatsApps was a “pre-bed ritual”.

Inevitably, Sturgeon tried to spin away the scandal. After the truth about her message deletion had been made public, a spokesperson for the former First Minister said: “In the interests of everyone who has been impacted by the Covid pandemic, Nicola is committed to full transparency to both the UK and Scottish Covid Inquiries. Any messages she had, she handled and dealt with in line with the Scottish government’s policies. Nicola has provided a number of written statements to the UK inquiry – totalling hundreds of pages – and welcomes the opportunity to give oral evidence to the inquiry again this month when she will answer all questions put to her.”

This wordy explanation didn’t get close to being good enough. Sturgeon’s version of events has her complying with Scottish Government policy as if she was a victim of their restrictions rather than a powerful figure with the authority to shape their direction. The truth is that no amount of spin gets Sturgeon off the hook. What matters is that we know she misled us all.

In August 2021, Channel 4’s Ciaran Jenkins asked the then First Minister whether she would guarantee to disclose emails and WhatsApp messages to a future public inquiry into handling of the Covid pandemic and that nothing would be “off limits”. Sturgeon’s voice dripped with derision. “If you understand statutory public inquiries,” she said, “you would know that even if I wasn’t willing to give that assurance, which for the avoidance of doubt I am, then I wouldn’t have the ability. This will be a judge-led statutory public inquiry,”

This was classic Sturgeon – the barely-concealed irritation at the audacity of the questioner, the blithe insistence that her actions would be beyond reproach.

Nothing Sturgeon now says can erase that exchange from the public record. The former SNP leader was absolutely clear that she would provide WhatsApp messages. It is also absolutely clear that, rather than doing so, she deleted them. What more do we need? The gun provided in evidence on Friday is still smoking.

Yesterday, Sturgeon broke her silence on the matter, insisting the inquiry does have messages sent between her and those she most regularly communicated with through informal means. But she admitted this is so only because others did not – as she did – delete their messages. The question of what, precisely, has been deleted remains.

Inevitably, there are those willing to defend Sturgeon’s actions. Across social media, we see the suggestion that the ex-FM is the victim of a smear campaign. Supporters deploy an endless battery of whataboutery, pointing to failings by UK Government figures during the pandemic.

A useful experiment for those tempted to debase themselves by blindly backing Sturgeon would be for them to imagine we were discussing the deliberate deletion of messages by Boris Johnson. If those supporting the former SNP leader would be perfectly happy to defend Johnson if he was in Sturgeon’s position, then fine (though any who says he would is, I think, a liar).

When she stepped down as SNP leader last spring, Sturgeon’s departure from the frontline was seen as as serious blow to her party. It’s now getting increasingly difficult to imagine Sturgeon could ever have stayed in office.

The past year has seen the truth about the SNP under Sturgeon unravel. An ongoing police investigation into allegations of fraud continues to rock the party, while an increasing number of dissenting voices exposes growing splits in nationalist ranks. Meanwhile, it’s become clear that – despite SNP promises that theirs was a new, more honest and open politics – the party has made secrecy a matter of course while in power.

We are now expected to believe that nothing deleted by Sturgeon or others was relevant to the inquiry. It is not possible for us to do this. Nobody can know – because the evidence has been destroyed – whether those WhatsApps were important or not. The reassurance from allies of Sturgeon that everything is just fine is worthless. All of us paid heavy prices during the Coronavirus pandemic. If we were among the lucky ones, we had only to deal with long, difficult separations from family and friends. Many suffered greater pain, losing loved ones in the most distressing of circumstances. Regardless of our experience, we were all entitled to expect our political leaders would keep to their words and do everything in their power to assist the public inquiry into the pandemic.

It is now clear Nicola Sturgeon has failed us all in this regard. We should be grateful she is no longer in power at Holyrood.