Scottish Lockdown Queen Admits Deleting Covid-Era Messages, Failed to Record ‘Gold Command’ Meeting Minutes

Sturgeon
JEFF J MITCHELL/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

Disgraced former first minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon has admitted to deleting messages with staff during the Chinese coronavirus crisis, despite claims of being transparent and open about decisions made during the lockdowns.

Arriving at a Covid-19 inquiry in Edinburgh, the former head of the leftist-separatist Scottish National Party (SNP), Nicola Sturgeon was greeted with heckles from the public, with shouts of “Where are your WhatsApps?” as she entered the city’s International Conference Centre, The Times of London reported.

In the hearing on Wednesday, Sturgeon publicly confirmed media reports that she had personally deleted swaths of Covid-era communications with government staff on the mobile WhatsApp messaging service on her phone, severely undercutting her claims of operating a government based on “openness and transparency”.

Casting doubt on this assertion — which she continues to maintain — the inquiry heard that the former manager of the Coronavirus response for the Scottish government, Ken Thompson, sent messages explaining to bureaucrats where the “clear chat” function was in the app, while boasting that “plausible deniability is my middle name”.

Sturgeon has attempted to downplay her decision to delete the messages from her phone, saying that she was able to recover some of the communications and provided them to the inquiry, while claiming that no major decisions were made over WhatsApp.

However, the hearing on Wednesday also heard that Sturgeon’s government also failed to record minutes from “gold command” meetings with her advisors and top ministers on the lockdown response during 2020 and 2021, The Guardian reports.

“Therefore, it becomes difficult to understand what precisely the ultimate decision-making process is, when there is no record of how those decisions were ultimately taken,” said the inquiry’s counsel Jamie Dawson KC.

Dawson went on to claim that the Scottish government under Sturgeon  “did not like light to be shone” on its decision-making process, to which Sturgeon replied: “I would very strongly refute that.”

“We will not have got every decision right, and we will have made misjudgments and there will be undoubtedly instances put to me today where on reflection I will think that we could have been more transparent than we were, but given the nature of the emergency that we were confronted with, building a relationship of trust with the public was important, and in my view then and in my view now that had to be built on a spirit of openness,” she said.

Apparently, on the verge of breaking down into tears, Sturgeon said: “I was the first minister when the pandemic struck. There’s a large part of me wishes that I hadn’t been but I was and I wanted to be the best first minister,” adding that she often “felt overwhelmed by the scale” of the crisis. In a quivering voice, Sturgeon also rejected the assertions that she was “thinking of political opportunity” during the outset of the lockdowns.

The scandal is the latest to befall the ex-first minister — a position roughly equivalent to that of governor in the United States — having been arrested last year alongside her husband and former chief executive of the SNP Peter Murrell in a corruption probe surrounding the alleged misallocation of funds donated to the party for personal gain. The power player couple have yet to be charged with any crime and have denied any wrongdoing.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on X: or e-mail to: kzindulka@breitbart.com

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