Emotional Sturgeon says she is deeply sorry for Covid response

A much-diminished Nicola Sturgeon gave evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry in Edinburgh today saying that she will carry the regret she feels for the decisions she got wrong during the pandemic.

Questioned by Jamie Dawson KC, the former first minister looked like a lesser figure away from the machine of party politics and prime-time televised briefings. 

She said that despite the death toll being too high, her government was trying its best to keep people safe during Covid. She said: “I feel to my core that the number of lives lost to this pandemic was far too high. I was motivated solely by trying to do the best we could to keep people as safe as possible.”

Sturgeon was visibly emotional on a few occasions. At one point, she choked up when saying that she sometimes wished she wasn’t the first minister during such a stressful period. Another time, when referring to Dawson’s grilling, she said: “I take it very, very, personally when people question these motives. Because I know that the motives were… absolutely in good faith and for the best reasons.”

The blockbuster moment of the day came when Sturgeon finally admitted that she had deleted her informal WhatsApp messages. The admission comes after months of obfuscation and denial. At least the people of Scotland finally heard it from the horse’s mouth. 

She was asked whether her government’s divergence from the UK government was intended to bolster her party’s nationalist political agenda. She denied that this was the case and passed judgment on the then Prime Minister: “I don’t think I’m betraying any secrets here when I thought Boris Johnson was the wrong person to be prime minister, full stop.”

Jamie Dawson has been generally well-regarded in the past couple of weeks, and many have preferred his incisive style to that of his London counterpart Hugo Keith KC – but there was a minor slip. 

Dawson KC showed the hearing a WhatsApp conversation between national clinical director Jason Leitch and then health secretary Humza Yousaf where they discussed the possible closure of the Euro Championship fanzone in Glasgow. Leitch said it was Sturgeon’s instinct to cancel the event while Yousaf said her instincts were rarely wrong. Dawson asked Sturgeon if this proved that she regularly made decisions based on instinct. The event was not cancelled and she said she had sought external professional advice to make the decision. The lead counsel’s line of reasoning did not reveal what he thought it would.  

When asked if the “story of Covid in Scotland is the story of the hubris of Nicola Sturgeon”, she maintained that it was not. “I am deeply sorry to each and every bereaved person and each and every person who suffered,” she added.

Her guarded answers today were exactly what one would expect from someone of her experience. But her demeanour was a far cry from those halcyon days when she led the SNP and it seemed like nothing could go wrong.

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