The UK Covid Inquiry hears the former first minister’s messages were ‘deleted in routine tidying up of inboxes or changing of phones’ while John Swinney and Jason Leitch also routinely cleared out their phones – leaving us in the dark about Scotland’s pandemic decision makers
Special report by Bill Heaney
Nicola Sturgeon deleted her pandemic WhatsApp messages, despite being told to retain them by the UK Covid Inquiry. This is despite her promise in August 2021 that all messages would be handed over.
This evidence was heard at the inquiry’s hearings in Edinburgh today (Friday) and ends weeks of speculation over what had happened to the former first minister’s texts and messages.
Disclosing evidence received from the Scottish Government, lead counsel to the inquiry Jamie Dawson KC said: “Under the box marked Nicola Sturgeon, it says that messages were not retained, they were deleted in routine tidying up of inboxes or changing of phones, unable to retrieve messages.”
Questioning top civil servant Lesley Fraser, the director-general of corporate, he asked if it was correct that “Nicola Sturgeon had retained no messages whatsoever in connection with her management of the pandemic”? Ms Fraser replied: “That is what that indicates to me.”
The Scottish Government has also been unable to retrieve any of her messages from the corporate record, with Mr Dawson asking: “Does that mean that we have no access to the former first minister’s messages in connection with her management of the pandemic?”
With the former SNP leader due to give evidence in the coming days, Ms Fraser said “Ms Sturgeon will be able to explain that much better…” before she was interrupted by Mr Dawson, who said: “I think that’s just a matter of logic.”
Ken Thomson, the former director general for constitution and external affairs and manager of the Covid Co-ordination Directorate of the Scottish Government, was the next to face questioning.
Mr Thomson said the use of electronic messaging grew “very rapidly” at the start of the pandemic as people switched to working at home but he insisted that all major decisions were taken in Cabinet meetings, which are formally minuted.
Mr Thomson said: “The first minister did not take a decision in informal messaging. It would be very rare that she would message me at all, never mind to make a decision.”
However, Mr Dawson turned the ‘Covid outbreak group’ which included Deputy Chief Medical Officer Nicola Steedman and the National Clinical Director Jason Leitch, and shows Mr Thomson calling for messages to be cleared.
The inquiry is shown a series of WhatsApp group exchanges from 13 May 2021 in which Mr Thomson posts: “I feel moved at this point to tell you that this chat is FOI-recoverable.” He includes an emoji with a zipped mouth. Two minutes later, Prof Jason Leitch responds: “WhatsApp deletion is a pre-bed ritual.”
Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said: “Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney have huge questions to answer over their conduct in the wake of this devastating revelation. By deleting all their WhatsApp messages, they defied the inquiry’s clear instructions from June 2021 that all relevant messages had to be retained.
“Their actions may be illegal and beg a very simple question: what were they trying to hide? Shamefully and outrageously for families of those who died during the pandemic, we may never know. Nicola Sturgeon’s reputation, which has been tarnished by a series of scandals in the last year, now lies in tatters.
“Secrecy and evasion were the hallmarks of her government – and this shameful cover-up, which amounts to a digital torching of vital evidence, is the most scandalous example of it. Both Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney must urgently answer questions in parliament on this.”
Conservative Douglas Ross, Labour’s Dame Jackie Baillie and LibDem Alex Cole-Hamilton.
Scottish Labour deputy leader Jackie Baillie said: “This revelation is nothing short of horrifying and shows the lengths that Nicola Sturgeon is prepared to go to in order to prevent justice for Covid-bereaved families.
“Despite giving assurances to keep all correspondence, Nicola Sturgeon has completely broken her promise to the people of Scotland.
“This is nothing short of a shocking betrayal of the people of Scotland who suffered so much during the pandemic.
“Nicola Sturgeon should hang her head in shame. The inquiry must take all measures it can to get to the truth – despite SNP obstruction.”
Responding to the news emerging from the UK Covid Inquiry, which has today also heard that Deputy First Minister John Swinney deployed WhatsApp’s autodelete, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP said:
“This is rotten to the core. Everyone knew from the start that there would be a public inquiry, so to delete messages on an industrial scale is shameful. Nicola Sturgeon made an unambiguous commitment on national television to retain all records and hand them over to judges.
“Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney have chosen to undermine the work of the inquiries and by assuring Parliament that they would hand over all material, they have in fact misled it.
“Even Richard Nixon didn’t destroy the Watergate tapes.
“Bereaved families at the heart of this may forever be deprived of the answers and understanding they are looking for, and with it closure.
“This is one of the biggest scandals in Scottish political history. Nicola Sturgeon must urgently attend Parliament to make a personal statement and stop dodging questions.”
Nicola Sturgeon’s care home guidance led to ‘unnecessary’ deaths.
We always knew that the Covid pandemic was far more serious than the authorities were prepared to admit.
And that, far from covering themselves in glory in the way they were handling the crisis, they were engaging in a shambles and indulging in an astronomical cover-up with deadly consequences.
We were operating in the Secret Scotland for which the SNP government is infamous and in which openness and transparency are anathema (verboten in the language of fascists) to the mediocre ranks of the powers that be.
This country is alleged to be democratic, but our politicians and officials who run our public services consider themselves above dealing with the plebs who make up the press and public, the people who pay their salaries and fund the services.
However, the truth will out. It may take a long time for the public to find out what is – and has – been done in their name but, as in the scandalous case of the Post Office, it will happen even if it’s only eventually. Eventually is better than never.
The Press is frequently trashed; we are feared because we tell the truth in this secret society.
Why do we have so many public inquiries in this country?
It is because our public servants, the politicians and the police cannot be relied upon to tell the truth. At least not at the first time of asking.
We are finding this out yet again at Scottish Covid Inquiry.
We are finding this out at the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry.
We are finding this out at the Scottish island ferries inquiry.
We are finding this out at the Scottish Hospitals Inquiry.
We found this out at the C-diff inquiry into deaths at Vale of Leven Hospital.
We are finding this out when councils, such as West Dunbartonshire, frustrate our inquiries by refusing to speak to us and insist we use the Freedom of Information service, which is broken.
We are finding this out when ever we turn over a stone here.
What’s underneath too often, far too often, is yet another can of worms such as the circumstances of Michelle Mone’s role in the awarding of a government contract for PPE to one of her billionaire husband’s many companies.
Such as the fact that senior officials of West Dunbartonshire Council were wining and dining and playing golf with contractors who were looking for work from them and such fraternisation was not allowed. And no procurement rules had been place for four years.
Scottish Government’s controversial Covid care home guidance led to “unnecessary” deaths, the UK Covid Inquiry was told on Thursday. The damning claim was made by Scottish Care chief executive Dr Donald Macaskill.
Nicola Sturgeon and her then health secretary Jeane Freeman have been accused by campaigners of “corporate homicide” after thousands of elderly people were admitted to care homes from hospitals without being tested for the coronavirus.
There were various dangerous outbreaks in care facilities leading to hundreds of deaths in the early stages of the pandemic, but what did we know? What were we told?
We were treated like mushrooms, kept in the dark and had scat thrown at us when ever we asked a civil question. We are banned.
He said in evidence: “We continued to make overtures during this period…From the perspective of our members and what we were hearing from frontline staff was an absolute conviction on their part that unnecessarily people died during that period of time.
“And I’m very aware of Public Health Scotland’s statistical minimum impact but as I said when that report came out, statistics tell one story but if you talk to women and men involved, they will tell you another story.”
Public Health Scotland claimed there was no evidence of a link between discharging patients and Covid outbreaks. But it changed its mind a year later in 2021 when it amended that report to say it “cannot rule out” a link.
What else did the authorities lie to us about?
Dr Macaskill said the care sector faced a “dreadful dilemma” when balancing the need for new residents to be Covid free versus the desire to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed. The guidance was eventually changed in April with two negative tests being required prior to admission to a care home.
He also hit out at the lack of PPE in care homes and said Health Protection Scotland and Public Health Scotland did not understand the social care sector. He added: “The care home sector was literally hung out to dry.”
The UK Covid Inquiry is sitting in Scotland for three weeks and will hear evidence next week from the high profile figures in this scandalous saga – the likes of Jason Leitch, Humza Yousaf and Alister Jack, along with Gregor Smith and Devi Sridhar.
The academic, a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Stirling, was asked to prepare an expert report for the UK Covid-19 Inquiry focusing on Scottish Government decision-making during the pandemic. He was questioned about the “extremely extensive” report when giving evidence to the inquiry in Edinburgh on Thursday. He said the Government did not appear to learn from experience in relation to the pandemic and lockdowns in 2020.
Professor Cairney said: “It you were to distil down all the evidence from the Scottish Government, you could turn it into a very simple convincing story which is we are a well co-ordinated learning organisation, we may not have been prepared for this new pandemic in spring 2020 but we are an effective organisation to the extent that we can learn and respond to subsequent pandemics much more effectively.
“I think that’s the Scottish Government position and I think there’s also witness statements from the former first minister (Nicola Sturgeon) and deputy first minister (John Swinney) that encapsulate that assertion of learning.
“The First Minister says I told the Scottish Cabinet in December 2020 that essentially we have learned that you cannot wait for the problem to become a crisis, you have to act quickly, we learned that from the first lockdown.
“The deputy first minister says we’ve learned that in key cases sometimes only a major lockdown will do, these other measures are not going to work, so they both talk about learning from the previous experience in the sense that it would inform their future decisions, and that is a good learning organisation.
“But what I can’t then do is reconcile that with the fact that they appear to have made exactly the same mistakes twice.
“The first one was understandable because the virus was novel, lockdown in March was something that was profoundly different from what anyone had been used to, they clearly were not sure what would happen, how much people would adhere to the guidelines.
“But they state time and time again in their documents, we learned a lot from what happened during that lockdown and we’ve learned a lot about what this virus is – and yet they appear to have produced the same delays in response for the second lockdown as the first, so in my mind that does not exhibit pandemic preparedness in relation to continuously learning.”
Jamie Dawson KC, lead counsel to the current module of the inquiry, said it has heard evidence about Covid-19 mortality rates in subsequent years of the pandemic and hospitals being “overwhelmed” in 2021, and a “perfect storm” of issues.
He asked: “Are these features of the evidence consistent with your general proposition that the evidence doesn’t seem to suggest that you’ve seen, that lessons were learned during the pandemic such as to combat further waves and further devastation?”
Professor Cairney replied: “Yes I think that the Scottish Government documents talk much more about learning than they demonstrate learning feeding into action.”
He said he does not see evidence of longer term learning that will produce something to inform the next pandemic.
Inquiry chairwoman Baroness Heather Hallett asked: “Are you saying it’s translating the words into action?”
The witness replied: “Yes, I think the Scottish Government produces beautiful strategy documents, it has a wonderful language to describe how it wants to be, it does not have the same effective language for describing how it is.”
Later, the inquiry heard from Donald Macaskill, chief executive of Scottish Care, which represents the independent social care sector in Scotland.
He told the inquiry that Scottish Care came to the view as early as February 2020 that patients should be tested for Covid-19 before being discharged from hospital into care homes.
However, Usman Tariq, counsel to the inquiry, told how it did not become mandatory until April 21 that year for patients to have two negative covid-19 tests and for all new admissions to care homes to be isolated for 14 days.
He said that between March 1 and April 21 2020, 82% of the 3,595 patients discharged from hospitals to care homes were not tested for the virus.
Mr Macaskill said that the care home population was the group most at risk from Covid-19.
However, he said that care homes felt under “undeniable pressure” to accept patients transferred from hospital without being tested to avoid so-called bed blocking.
He told the inquiry: “There was a constant barrage about how important it was that the social care sector stepped up to the plate and was able to keep the flow going”.
Mr Macaskill said he raised the issue of testing with the then health secretary, Jeane Freeman, at a meeting on March 18 that year.
Mr Tariq asked whether the lack of testing capacity was given as the reason for the absence of testing for care home residents.
Mr Macaskill said: “Ms Freeman indicated at the meeting that lack of capacity was the main reason, but around that, at the time, there was a clinical discussion around the effectiveness of testing and the risks attached to it.”
He said that some of the guidance given to care homes about following measures such as social distancing was “not fit for purpose”.
Mr Macaskill also told of the impact that measures such as lockdowns had on residents, with some “turning their face to the wall” and losing their sense of purpose because they had no contact with family.
Sixty people living in local care homes died after contracting Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, according to figures released by the Scottish Care Inspectorate.
This data was described at the time as “heart-breaking” by Dumbarton MSP Dame Jackie Baillie, who said it was vital that a public inquiry focussed o mind lessons which can be learned.
HC-One run Castle View Care Home in Dumbarton was the worst affected facility with a total of 23 Covid-related deaths from March 2020, seven of which had occurred between March 2021 and May 2022.
At West Dunbartonshire Council-run Crosslet House Care Home, there were 11 deaths throughout the pandemic, and at Balquhidder in Alexandria, Covid-related fatalities totalled one dozen. In Helensburgh, Northwood House Care Home was worst affected with six deaths. The Argyle Care Centre reported four deaths, Lochside House had three Covid-related deaths and Morar Lodge has had one.
The new figures were revealed after a ruling at the High Court in England that the UK Government’s similar policy on discharging untested patients into care homes was unlawful.
Dame Jackie, who obtained the latest statistics, demanded the First Minister “faces up to the potentially unlawful decision” her government made by discharging patients from hospitals to care homes at the height of the pandemic, without testing.
She said at the time: “It is really sad to hear that 60 residents in local care homes have died from Covid and that this total has increased by 15 in just over a year.
“This is heart-breaking for the families as each of these statistics represents someone who was loved and will be sorely missed.
“It is imperative that people realise that, although restrictions have been lifted, Covid still poses a threat particularly to those in vulnerable groups including the elderly.
“It was disappointing last month that, despite the landmark ruling in England, Nicola Sturgeon failed to admit her Government made potentially unlawful mistakes at the start of the pandemic which has cost lives.
“It is vital that a public inquiry which has been promised by the SNP Government focuses on lessons which can be learned from the pandemic particularly where people have died and how these tragedies could be prevented if this situation arises again.”
Public Health Scotland data has previously showed that untested patients had been sent to local facilities throughout the spring of2020 at the height of the pandemic.
A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: “First and foremost our thoughts are with every single family which has lost a loved one during the course of the pandemic.
“Our priority throughout the pandemic has been to save lives and we have sought to take the best decisions, based on the best scientific and clinical evidence that we have had at any given time, to keep people living and working in our care homes as safe as possible.
Top picture: Nicola Sturgeon with two local SNP MPs – Martin Docherty Hughes and Brendan O’Hara.