Oh dear. It seems the blessed Nicola has slipped up again. Away from the high sea shenanigans of the fuity Houthi rebels, up in Edinburgh the extent of Sturgeon’s secret state is well and truly being exposed. Today the Scottish Covid Inquiry published text messages from the former First Minister to her onetime advisor, the sainted Devi Sridhar. They show that, at the height of the pandemic in summer 2020, Sturgeon was advising Sridhar to contact her by channels which would not fall under Scotland’s freedom of information laws and therefore could not be made public.
In one text from 4 June, Shridar texted to ask Sturgeon ‘I’ve done a note for CMO [Chief Medical Officer]… on key steps to managing outbreak in Scotland looking forward. Happy to share a draft with you as well but don’t want to overstep or break protocol.’ Sturgeon’s response? ‘That would be very helpful. (Don’t worry about protocol – tackling the virus more important than that – and I’ll handle any issues on that front).’ She then listed her SNP email address, to which FOI laws do not apply. So much for all that talk of transparency…
This opens up something of a can of worms for the nationalists. Just how much other Scottish Government business has been moved off the radar to the SNP’s private email accounts? Less than a year prior to the text, in September 2019, Sturgeon’s spokesman told journalists that Sturgeon did not use a personal account to ‘conduct substantive government business’.
What exactly was more substantive than the pandemic?
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