There’s no rest for the wicked as Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy continues to take a bashing. At a Covid Inquiry hearing in Edinburgh today, evidence was revealed that the former first minister deleted all WhatsApp messages she sent and received during the pandemic.
Jamie Dawson KC, counsel to the inquiry, said: “Under the box ‘Nicola Sturgeon’, it says that messages were not retained, they were deleted in routine tidying up of inboxes or changes of phones, unable to retrieve messages.”
He added: “What that tends to suggest is at the time that request was made Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister of Scotland, had retained no messages whatsoever in connection with her management of the pandemic.”
This comes after Sturgeon repeatedly refused to confirm whether or not she retained any messages from her time in office during Covid. Back in November, current first minister Humza Yousaf and deputy first minister Shona Robison were forced to apologise for interpreting the Covid Inquiry’s request for messages “too narrowly”.
Shona Robison had told MSPs that the devolved Scottish government was asked for messages by the UK inquiry in September, but a subsequent timeline authored by Robison showed requests for messages as early as February.
Nicola Sturgeon’s spokesperson maintains that, despite not being able to prove anything because no messages exist, “Any messages she had, she handled and dealt with in line with the Scottish Government’s policies.”
Speaking on Thursday, the spokesperson 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.
“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.”
The Hound suggests that when the next pandemic and consequent abandonment of civil liberties occurs, we should not allow countries to be run through private and erasable messaging apps.
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