What comes around, goes around. The SNP government has never been slow in condemning the Tories for a lack of transparency in the ongoing UK Covid Inquiry. So it was to Steerpike’s amusement then that Humza Yousaf and his Scottish government are now facing criticism for not handing their key messages over to that same probe. Talk about being hoist by your own petard…
This morning Jamie Dawson KC, the legal counsel to the inquiry, said that the Scottish government had been asked to provide ‘all communications related to key decisions made during the pandemic’, including informal messages on WhatsApp, but that ‘no messages’ had been handed over. So much for open government.
It led to a very embarrassing First Minister’s Questions at Holyrood today for the hapless Humza Yousaf, as he faced a grilling from Douglas Ross. ‘Grieving families deserve answers… Where are the messages, where have they gone and has the Scottish Government deleted any messages?’ raged the Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross. ‘The Scottish Government did not make decisions through Whatsapp,’ Yousaf replied, hurriedly adding: ‘That’s not what we routinely did. I know that was very different to what was being intimated by the UK government.’ The First Minister later admitted, after the session, that the Scottish government will ‘fully investigate’ the claims.
But Mr S isn’t so sure that the First Minister’s memory is holding up. Only last November, it was revealed that four SNP ministers used Whatsapp to conduct government business — including Yousaf himself. More secrecy fears arose when freedom of information requests asking for the content of these messages to be revealed were rejected on cost grounds. And, as the Times revealed on Thursday evening, the Whatsapp messages of Scotland’s clinical director Professor Jason Leitch are unable to be scrutinised because, it transpires, he deleted them daily…
But Yousaf’s bleating didn’t deter Ross: ‘The First Minister must know what is required… Despite that, and I’m not going to say deliberately, maybe inadvertently, the First Minister misled parliament there.’ Ouch. Denying the claims, Yousaf then resorted to harping on about how the government didn’t ‘routinely make decisions’ on the app.
Indeed, given the state of Scotland’s public services, the back of a fag packet might have served equally well…
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