Nicola Sturgeon handled the Covid pandemic rather well. You might not expect me to say that after all that’s happened this year, but it’s true. The former first minister was – or is – a highly effective communicator who managed to persuade Scottish voters that she knew what she was doing, even as she made all the same mistakes as Boris Johnson.
In her daily pandemic press conferences, she always sounded well briefed and coherent — unlike the prime minister, who often bumbled his way through his script falling back on bad jokes. Sturgeon focussed relentlessly on a single message: that social democratic Scotland was dealing with the pandemic in a more humane way than the Brexit Tories. It was largely rubbish, but she sounded good.
The former first minister was back on message at the Covid inquiry today, insisting that she never agreed with the idea of an acceptable level of harm during the pandemic. The very idea.
‘It became one of the points of difference between the Scottish and UK governments,’ Sturgeon went on, ‘the extent to which we were still trying to suppress, as opposed to live with, the virus.’
The subtext appeared to be that Boris Johnson did think there was an acceptable level of harm and that he gave up trying to suppress Covid under pressure from backbench right-wingers.
And, of course, Brexit made it all so much worse. Sturgeon said it was ‘deeply regrettable that resources had to be diverted from any other areas of work and in particular pandemic preparedness’ because of the threat of a no-deal Brexit.
The inquiry’s lead council, Hugo Keith KC, had to intervene to remind Sturgeon that she was ‘in a witness box not a soap box’. The ex-first minister wasn’t having that and replied, ‘with respect’, that he’d raised Brexit himself in his questioning.
It is still part of the mythology of the pandemic, eagerly amplified by sections of the UK media including the New Scientist, that Scotland could have all but eliminated Covid had it not been for the UK government’s indolence. Exactly three years ago this week, Nicola Sturgeon’s key academic cheerleader, professor Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh University, announced that ‘Scotland is on track to eliminate the coronavirus by the end of the summer’.
Nationalists dressed in hazmat suits tried to erect border checks to keep out English tourists. Nicola Sturgeon disowned this stunt, but the press was briefed about the first minister’s frustration that she could not do anything about the openness of the border. She seemed to want to emulate the apparent success of her idol, Jacinda Ardern, who’d subjected New Zealand to almost Chinese levels of lockdown.
The lead council, Hugh Keith KC had to intervene to remind Sturgeon that she was ‘in a witness box not a soap box’.
‘Zero Covid’ was, of course, fantasy and 18 months later Scotland was actually recording proportionately more cases than England. But the framing of Covid as essentially a Brexit disease largely worked. Sturgeon always looked for ways to upstage Boris Johnson, usually by delaying the lifting of lockdown for a couple of weeks. In the meantime, the likes of Professor Sridhar condemned the UK’s strategy. This continued even after it was demonstrated that Scottish Covid mortality was ahead of England’s
Scotland was equally, if not more, careless of the lives of the elderly decanted from hospital without testing and into care homes — where the disease was rampant. Scotland also ended community test and trace prematurely in 2020 on the grounds, as the national clinical director Jason Leitch put it, that the ‘vast majority will have a mild illness’. He said that he didn’t much like the term ‘herd immunity’ but that Scotland was essentially following the same approach: trying to to manage the disease to allow it to ‘spread through the community’ while protecting the most vulnerable.
Sturgeon initially argued against following Ireland in closing down the schools. She said — probably rightly — that it was safer for children to stay in the relatively hygienic environment of the classroom. Later, she went full lockdown and even made the wearing of masks legally binding, unlike in England. That meant that for a time Scots risked being prosecuted for absence of masks but not for being in simple possession of class A drugs, which was effectively decriminalised in September 2021.
Today was only Nicola Sturgeon’s opening gambit in the Covid inquiry. She will no doubt be back on message in the next ‘module’ devoted to the handling of the pandemic proper. Nicola Sturgeon of course resigned as first minister in February and has been battling the ‘donorgate’ scandal ever since. Today she looked — and sounded — relieved to be back playing her greatest hits.
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