There is no hiding place for SNP on deleted Covid messages - John McLellan

It would be naïve to think Scottish Government deletion culture is limited to covid-related messages

She might have a famous Scottish surname, but it’s fair to say Fiona Bruce’s knowledge of Scottish politics is less than intimate, so whenever SNP representatives are on Question Time programmes outside Scotland they tend to get a free ride.

In a discussion last week about the cost of living, Alyn Smith MP cited the uncosted Council Tax freeze as an example of how “we do this stuff differently” and as usual it went by without comment, leaving a Bradford audience and the rest of the UK with an unchallenged assertion of Scottish exceptionalism. There really should be a rule that if the show includes an SNP representative, they are matched by someone else who knows about Scotland.

However, once in a while an issue comes up where there is no hiding place, where the “wha’s like us” attitude so long favoured by Scottish ministers not only doesn’t wash but backfires badly; ferries built with the wrong kind of steel which haven’t sailed, a minister allegedly grooming a teenager, the mysterious purchase of a campervan, that sort of thing.

Into this category goes the deleted Covid WhatsApp messages, information which would have revealed the thinking behind some of the Scottish Government’s most far-reaching decisions as the pandemic took hold and lockdown was imposed. As most readers will remember, it was also a period when, night after night, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon went out of her way to be seen to be “doing this stuff differently” to the rest of the UK, and gained plaudits for what appeared to be a firm grip compared to the apparent chaos in Westminster. But it was all front without substance, particularly in the early stages as hospital wards were cleared, and care homes became seething centres of deadly infection.

I am not involved in the Scottish Covid Bereaved Group, but as I wrote here in April 2020, my father was one of the early victims. The last man in his ward at the Langlands geriatric unit at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital which had been emptied overnight, he was sent to the Oakbridge home in Knightswood, was readmitted after a fall a few days later, tested positive and died of Covid within a week. So yes, like hundreds of other families I would like to know how Ms Sturgeon and her colleagues made their decisions.

My father’s funeral had barely taken place when Ms Sturgeon said there would be a public inquiry, and given her unequivocal, not to say aggressive, response to Channel 4 journalist Ciaran Jenkins’ question a year later that she was prepared to disclose “emails, WhatsApps, private emails” it should have been expected that a lawyer who understood statutory public inquiries, as she said she did, would also have understood the need to retain any material which would assist the process. I have no doubt she did, but then I’d also have to believe a kilted pig would fly over Holyrood if I thought for a minute that someone with Ms Sturgeon’s steely determination would risk allowing an inquiry to pore over every syllable of the messages she exchanged during the emergency. Who knows what else they would reveal?

WhatsApp on private phones is the communication system of choice for politicians; not an official channel, set up instantly by members of tight groups who know each other and, theoretically at least, with more ability to identify leakers. And all with the added lure of “end-to-end encryption” and no recoverability of deleted messages; once they’re gone they’re gone, well beyond the reach of Freedom of Information requests.

As demonstrated during the subsequent investigations into the failed prosecution of Alex Salmond, Ms Sturgeon was international quality when it came to responsibility avoidance, memory loss and obfuscation, so why would anyone think this might be different? It now appears that WhatsApp messages sent by her and the ex-Deputy First Minister John Swinney have been wiped, along with around 70 other people whose messages were requested by the UK Covid inquiry, including the chief medical officer Jason Leitch whose messages were said to have been deleted daily. It strongly suggests a clear-up operation on a par with American diplomats abandoning the Tehran embassy and, if so, who was responsible for the orchestration? Ms Sturgeon’s spokesman must think our collective heads button up the back not to see a promise to provide any information “that she holds” is meaningless if key messages no longer exist.

It would be naïve to think Scottish Government deletion culture is limited to covid-related messages and it was pitiful watching the hapless Greens co-leader and circular economy minister Lorna Slater squirming under cross-examination by the BBC’s Martin Geissler on Sunday, his eyes narrowing in disbelief as she claimed not to have a government phone and her own phone was only for personal business. Even as a lowly opposition councillor, I was issued with a spanking new iphone. In Ms Slater’s defence, it might explain why everything she touches is a disaster, but it is stretching credibility either to believe a minster doesn’t have a government phone or that her personal phone is never used for government business. Maybe she has government pigeons, or a publicly funded Aldis lamp.

We do indeed, do this stuff differently. And maybe Conservative ministers now wish they too had adopted a scorched earth policy to their messages on private social media accounts, rather than opening themselves up to ridicule and public dismay as is now happening. Who knew Carrie Johnson was calling the shots? Maybe they were cavalier about the chances of those messages becoming public, but in this case at least there is a clear and obvious difference in attitudes to openness between the two administrations.

Wha’s like us, damn few, and they’re a’ deid. Their reputations or honesty and openness are certainly dying, but for sheer cynicism, there’s damn few like Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP. And as this is Journalism Matters week, thank goodness we live in a country where we can still read all about it.