Nicola Sturgeon’s decisions during the pandemic are to come under scrutiny with the UK Covid Inquiry’s move to Scotland.
For many of us who had to live through the then-first minister’s political posturing for the best part of two years, there is hope – notwithstanding the fact that she has deleted all her WhatsApps – that she will be held to account at long last.
That was certainly not the case as the virus took hold and she took to her soapbox. Her daily Covid briefings, broadcast by BBC Scotland, were not the jousting matches of the London press conferences.
She put herself centre stage, delivering cod science in hectoring tones that brooked no dissent. If anyone dared accuse her of using her platform as a party political broadcast, they were slapped down for undermining Scotland’s public health.
Even when the BBC tentatively tried to halt the Covid broadcasts north of the border in September 2020, long after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had ceased his daily updates, Sturgeon protested and, lo and behold, Saint Nicola was soon back on our screens.
Far from being quizzed over why her lockdown policies were harsher and longer than England’s, why she maintained damaging mask mandates for young children, and why she sent the elderly to die in care homes early on in the pandemic, Sturgeon was given a free ride.
Her goal was to present herself as Scotland’s saviour for adopting a different approach to Westminster’s and thus make her pitch every night for independence.
It was a partly successful ploy as she was consistently seen to have handled the pandemic better than the UK government, although as the hype died down, the cold statistics revealed otherwise.
Today, the political landscape in Scotland is much altered since the Covid years. Sturgeon has left under a cloud as her role in the disappearance of SNP campaign funds is investigated by Police Scotland.
Not only has her regime crumbled but support for her party has collapsed and Labour is tipped to regain much of the ground it lost to the Nationalists who have dominated Scottish politics since 2007.
Even more incredibly, in the Nat heartlands of Glasgow, where the Sturgeon cult took root, she is now dismissed as a failure.
When the BBC’s Today presenter Nick Robinson talked to women at the Pearce Institute bingo night in Govan this week, one said the former first minister had broken her promises on education and others said independence was no longer a priority and they would not be voting SNP.
This, from a city where all the seats are currently held by the Nationalists and which voted Yes in the 2014 referendum, shows how far the movement has retreated.
Scotland, for so long a one-party state, is now witnessing the resurgence of an opposition and it is against this backdrop that the overbearing Sturgeon administration will be probed over its conduct during Covid.
There are countless questions many of us would like to have asked at the time but, better late than never, let’s hope Lady Hallett, chair of the independent inquiry, will put these to Sturgeon and her cohorts now.
Such as, what justification was there for pursuing a risky zero Covid policy and, at the height of such madness, trying to isolate Scots from the rest of the UK?
Sturgeon said in the summer of 2020 that she would force English visitors to self-isolate for two weeks, while nationalist nutters mounted border vigilante posts in an attempt to keep the English out of Scotland.
Blindly following her hero Jacinda Ardern, who mistakenly thought she could keep New Zealand Covid-free with draconian curbs on the public, Sturgeon used the pandemic to drive a wedge between the British nations.
With zero Covid advocates (China included) now discredited, will those who advised Sturgeon stand up and be counted?
The medical sociologist Robert Dingwall, a rare voice of sanity and lockdown scepticism as Covid raged, wrote in the Telegraph this week that the inquiry “might identify who Sturgeon was listening to and why she found them so persuasive”.
If you lived in Scotland at the time, it isn’t difficult to name the culprits. Apart from her official medics, including Scotland’s chief medical officer Gregor Smith and national clinical director Jason Leitch, the most prominent Sturgeon cheerleader was Devi Sridhar.
The Edinburgh University chair of global public health, who sat on the Scottish government’s Covid Advisory Group, was a politicised proponent of lockdown mania and the main champion of zero Covid. She nailed her partisan colours to the mast in calling Unionists “anti-Scottish” and she blamed English tourists for spreading germs in Scotland.
The inquiry must also investigate why Scotland deviated from a UK-wide response at all, given that the virus knew no borders and that Scotland could achieve very little alone. The vaccination programme, mass testing and the furlough scheme were initiated and financed by Westminster, however much Sturgeon tried to credit Scottish largesse.
In the end, Scotland’s outcome was no better than the rest of the UK’s. In fact, in the summer of 2022 Scotland was found to have the highest rate of excess deaths in Britain, with Covid and lockdowns compounding the nation’s poor health record.
The pandemic fallout particularly impacted “households on low incomes or in poverty, low-paid workers, children and young people, older people, disabled people, minority ethnic groups and women”, according to a Scottish government study.
Lady Hallett may well ask whether Sturgeon was politically motivated in her handling of the pandemic but to that we already know the answer. As everything she did – or didn’t do – while in power was driven by her independence obsession, why would her Covid response be any different.
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