You have to hand it to the Scottish government: the deletion of WhatsApp messages is good preemptive news management, whether accidental, by default or deliberate. Once journalists get their hands on them, those curt, day-to-day messages can be just a tad embarrassing — as this week’s expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry confirms. The Scottish government may not, however, be subjected to the same level of message scrutiny. Just how many WhatsApps have been deleted we still do not know.
The Scottish government policy on message deletion was confirmed yesterday in a convoluted statement from the deputy first minister Shona Robison, which came just after Dominic Cummings had finished giving his expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry. Many of the more revealing comments by the government’s top science officers have been expressed in WhatsApp messages, including revelations that Professor Dame Angela McLean had dubbed Rishi Sunak ‘Dr Death’ and that Johnson suggested he thought Covid was ‘nature’s way of dealing with old people’. Providing an invaluable insight into the culture of No. 10, these messages illustrated how life and death decisions were made — or not made.
No one will ever know the full extent to which similar remarks were being made by Scottish ministers and civil servants because, according to First Minister Humza Yousaf, the Scottish government ‘had a social media messaging policy’ which ‘actually required us to routinely delete WhatsApp messages’, yet intriguingly Yousaf himself has said: ‘I’ve kept WhatsApp messages and fully intend to hand them over.’
Robison told the Chamber yesterday that all requested Scottish government messages that are still ‘held’ will be shared ‘in full and unredacted’ by 6 November. She repeated that it wasn’t the Scottish government ‘culture’ to make decisions on WhatsApp. This is besides the point. We know about the decisions, but it is the context in which they were taken that may not fully come to light. The Scottish Covid information trail is radically incomplete, with only the bare bones of official decision-making remaining.
Nicola Sturgeon popped into Holyrood last night to declare that she had ‘nothing to hide’ — though refused to answer, four times, whether she had actually deleted any of her own messages. And her former deputy John Swinney has also refused to confirm or deny that he deleted messages. One can only imagine the media frenzy had Johnson played that card.
The former first minister added that she wasn’t ‘a member of any WhatsApp groups’. Yet Sturgeon has used WhatsApp in the past: we know this from the Holyrood Inquiry into the Alex Salmond affair. Until she directly answers questions about whether she has deleted messages, there will be scepticism about other promises she has made.
When asked in August 2021 whether she could ‘guarantee to the bereaved families that you will disclose WhatsApps…that nothing will be off limits?’ Sturgeon replied:
‘If you understand statutory public inquiries you would know that even if I wasn’t prepared to give that assurance, which for the avoidance of doubt I am, then I wouldn’t have the ability. This will be a judge-led statutory inquiry.’
Nor do we know for sure whether Sturgeon and other ministers have all fully observed last year’s ‘do not destroy’ notices from the Scottish Covid Inquiry. These should have superseded any government policy of ‘routinely deleting WhatsApp messages’, to quote Yousaf — words that are causing a great deal of confusion given that Kate Forbes has today announced that she has not only retained all her WhatsApp messages from during the pandemic but supplied them to the Covid Inquiry.
After a Section 21 order was issued by the Inquiry to the Scottish government on Monday, Robison confirmed that work is now ‘underway’ to ensure that more than 14,000 of ‘mainly WhatsApp’ messages exchanged over the course of the pandemic can be shared, including messages from former ministers. But what appears like government foot dragging is certainly not a good look.
Has the Scottish government dodged a bullet this week? It may, after all, be better for them to face just a little criticism for delays in their evidence-giving than for the public to see the content of their WhatsApps if they are anything like the exchanges between Johnson and others being examined just now. And though questions remain over exactly when some messages were deleted — and how — the government is adamant they’ve broken no laws.
But the law aside, it is not for here-today-gone-tomorrow ministers to decide what is and what isn’t relevant to this Inquiry. ‘The issue around the deletion of messages is about being able to distinguish between messages about cups of coffee or when someone’s arriving at an event from important information that is about decision making or that has corporate value,’ Robison told parliament — but the Scottish government marking its own homework is not going to satisfy bereaved Covid relatives who feel they are not getting the full story.
One suspects Baroness Hallett may have something salty to say about all this in her report. And the next time an SNP politician pontificates about openness and transparency they’ll be met with a collective belly laugh.
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