McMafia: inside the SNP’s secret state

After years of scandal and intrigue, the Scottish National party has not lost its ability to shock. The UK Covid Inquiry has moved to Edinburgh for three weeks and in the process has exposed Nicola Sturgeon’s government to some robust scrutiny. The verbose, preening Hugo Keith has been replaced with Jamie Dawson, a more incisive KC. What he has uncovered has been a revelation.

That Sturgeon deleted her WhatsApp messages is bad enough. The ability to learn from the decision-making process is vital, so for a senior minister to wipe records like these can be seen as a conspiracy against the public. But as we have learned this week, the civil service in Scotland was also deeply complicit.

Humza Yousaf, the First Minister, was health secretary at the time. He was given advice from officials on how to dodge Covid mask laws. ‘Have a drink in your hands at all times,’ said Jason Leitch, the national clinical director. ‘Then you’re exempt.’ Leitch confides in another message that deleting messages has become his ‘pre-bed ritual’. Gregor Smith, Scotland’s chief medical officer, urged other civil servants to delete WhatsApp exchanges ‘at the end of every day’.

One of Scotland’s most senior civil servants, Ken Thomson, should have been stamping out this attitude. Instead, he warned colleagues that their chat ‘is discoverable under FOI’ and wanted them to ‘know where the “clear chat” button is’. In what may be one of the most memorable phrases uncovered by the inquiry on either side of the border, Thomson boasted to colleagues that ‘plausible deniability are my middle names’.

This was quite a moment, not just for the Covid Inquiry but for devolution in general. Thomson was once the right-hand man of the straight-playing Donald Dewar, regarded as a founding father of devolution.