Nicola Sturgeon’s afternoon at the Covid Inquiry was pretty brutal. She was subjected to a difficult round of questioning on whether she used the pandemic to advance the case for Scottish independence. Funnily enough, the former first minister didn’t agree with that analysis.
In fact, her memory was that she had never thought ‘less’ about politics than during the pandemic. She became quite fixated upon the purity of her motives in dealing with Covid, to the extent that her evidence started to resemble Tony Blair’s lengthy ruminations during the Chilcot Inquiry. Her voice became unusually querulous at points, telling Jamie Dawson KC that she took it ‘very, very personally when people question the very motives because I know the motives were absolutely in good faith and for the best reasons.’ She added: ‘My motives in this were only ever about trying to do the right thing to minimise the overall harm that the virus was doing.
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