Covid inquiry report: Why we mustn't let Nicola Sturgeon rewrite history
The sub-text to SNP claims about ‘eliminating’ Covid was the implication that Scotland was in a significantly better position that England. Statistics later show we were not
Reading Lady Hallett’s latest report on the Covid pandemic already feels a little like dipping back into history. It focuses on events from early 2020 when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister and Nicola Sturgeon was in her Scottish pomp.
This week’s volume relates to the second module of Lady Hallett’s inquiry under “decision-making and political governance”. There are nine modules and evidence is still being taken. On top of that, there is a Scottish inquiry which has “rescheduled its preliminary hearing to 10 March 2026”.
So there is a long way to go and public appetite for historic detail diminishes accordingly. Yet the implications remain deeply relevant for families who lost loved ones in circumstances which were avoidable, for children who missed schooling and found it hard to recover, for the “long Covid” victims, and so on.
For them all, it remains important for answers to be obtained and lessons learned. In Whitehall, ministers from Johnson downwards are long gone to nobody’s great regret. In Scotland, some of them are still around and should not be allowed to avoid accountability, least of all for the trail of evidence destruction in which they engaged.
At First Minister’s Questions, Anas Sarwar asked: “Given that John Swinney was central to the Scottish Government’s operations before, during and after the pandemic, does he regret deliberately deleting evidence for the inquiry, which frustrated its process? Will he take the opportunity to apologise?”
To which Mr Swinney replied lamely: “All the actions that I took regarding information were consistent with Scottish Government policy.”
That, frankly, is not good enough. As Lady Hallett’s report points out, the result – and presumably intention – was to “undermine external scrutiny of decision-making, transparency and, ultimately, public accountability”. In the absence of these private communications, we will never really know what was going on in terms of political manoeuvring around Covid decision-making.
No politicians come out of this report very well. Lady Hallett states bluntly: “The lack of urgency on the part of all four governments, and the failure to take more immediate emergency steps, are inexcusable.” No attempts at Scottish exceptionalism can evade that charge. The failure to make preparations, while red lights were flashing around the world is, in retrospect, astonishing.
Indeed, a Scottish Government civil servant, Derek Grieve, deputy director in the Health Protection Division, recorded on February 24, 2020, that it was “clear all departments in UK Govt are fully engaged and mobilised in a way that the Scottish Government simply isn’t”.
He had attended a meeting of senior officials within the Scottish Government and noted there was “still no real engagement. They then spent 20 mins talking about internal Scottish Government comms. Completely amazed!”
Let’s hope the Scottish inquiry deals in more detail with how it was possible for such awareness to exist at senior levels without filtering through to ministers. According to Lady Hallett, the Scottish Cabinet was at that point still dealing with Covid under “any other business”.
These days in late February 2020 were of critical importance, which I have reason to remember. We had been on holiday in Thailand where precautionary measures were in force. Closer to home, television screens were full of images from hospitals in the Lombardy region of Italy overrun by Covid cases. Yet so little was happening to prepare for the inevitable.
Worse followed. On March 2, Public Health Scotland was notified of an outbreak at the notorious Nike conference in Edinburgh, where the first cases in Scotland were found. Not only was the public not told but, the same week, French rugby supporters poured into Edinburgh for an international at Murrayfield. I didn’t know until I read this week’s report that the first death in Scotland was of a French rugby fan. Again, nobody was told.
By mid-March 2020, Ms Sturgeon and Mr Swinney had another pressing matter to deal with – the jury’s decision that Alex Salmond was not guilty on all charges brought against him. Was that another reason for the WhatsApp messages of the time to conveniently disappear?
Time is the ally of those who rewrite history and Ms Sturgeon was first out the traps, insisting that politics never entered her head during Covid. Aye, right. As well as WhatsApps, she is extensively criticised for, inter alia, sidelining advisers and promoting the fatuous claim that Scotland, left to its own unique devices, was on the verge of “eliminating” Covid.
The danger of the latter lay in “giving the impression to the Scottish public that the emergency was almost over and life could return to normal imminently. It may also have had another unintended and unfortunate practical effect. Public Health Scotland suggested that the use of different language by the Scottish Government to express policy intent led to challenges in its development of guidance.”
The sub-text was, of course, to imply we were in a significantly different position from England which, as every subsequent statistic confirmed, we most definitely were not. So a political line about “elimination” had direct policy impacts upon real people and real lives. Such attempts at differentiation were features of the period – on the grounds of politics or public health? Take your pick.
There were heroes as well as villains in the Covid story. They were in the front line of handling the consequences of the pandemic and the political ineptitude of the response, in the hospital wards and care homes loaded with patients who had not even been tested.
And ultimately, the battle was won by the scientific geniuses who came up with vaccines in record time to tame the virus, even if it will never entirely go away and others will come along. Let’s hope by then the politicians, as well as the hospitals, are better prepared.
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