Health News at Your Fingertips

Sturgeon is being asked about her use of a personal phone – as other members of her government did – and whether she felt it was appropriate.

It was never suggested to me at any time during my period as First Minister that it was not appropriate, she replies. She used a personal phone because she didn’t want to have multiple devices.

Jamie Dawson KC, for the inquiry, asks her about a report yesterday in the Scottish Daily Express that Sturgeon and Jeane Freeman, the Scottish Government’s Health Secretary at the time, purchased cheap mobile phones and prepaid top-up cards during the early months of the Covid pandemic.

Sturgeon says that they were the phones her constituency office landline were were diverted to in the homes of her constituency workers.

She had never “to the best of my knowledge seen heard or used any of the phones.”

The Inquiry is now taking a break until 11.30 before it moves on to other areas of questioning by Dawson.

Sturgeon has been shown exchanges from another WhatsApp group – which she was not a part of – in which a civil servant appeared to be encouraging others to delete records that could be recoverable under the Freedom of Information act

She says she “can’t answer” for Ken Thomson, the civil servant who made the remark, but she insists that her experience of him was that he was “assiduous” and took his duties and responsibilities seriously

“I can only speak about my experience of him and I can give an answer based on my interpretation of it, which was that it was meant to be a light hearted discussion,” she aded.

Sturgeon is being pressed at length on the rationale for not storing WhatsApp messages. The position she keeps on returning to is that any decisions taken would have been discussed at cabinet level and recorded there.

In many cases, she insists, she would have been standing at a podium later in the day being questioned about the issues at hand.

Sturgeon once again says she wants to be “very clear” that it was not her practice to have lengthy or detailed discussions through “these means” – a reference to WhatsApp.

“It’s not my style,” she insists.

What follows is an exchange between Sturgeon and Dawson over the manner in which messages were not retained on her phone. Dawson asks if she is making a distinction between deletion and not retaining messages, to which she tells him she was “very thorough” to keep to the advice she had been given about the retention of records.

“But did you delete them?” asks Dawson

“Yes,” comes the answer.

There was a frenetic pace in government at the time and the situation was changing several times a day, says Sturgeon. Three, four years on, it’s hard to appreciate that, she insists.

Dawson says however the fact that you are working at pace does not alter the need to ensure that decisions taken are stored on the corporate record.

As the conversation moves on, Sturgeon says that decisions taken were ones by their very nature were ones that could not be kept secret because they were ones the public was being asked to take.

I didn’t get to it earlier, but it’s worth reporting that Sturgeon says she was being asked during the pandemic to take decisions which she and other politicians had never experienced before. Her voice seemed to break a little bit as she added that she “thinks about them every day.”

Dawson is pressing Sturgeon a bit further on how seriously she took the retention of records.

“I knew I had operated in line with a policy I had operated in line with to ensure that conversations with others in government should not be kept in a phone that could be lost or destroyed,” she replies.

Surgeon is also asked about an exchange she had with a Channel 4 journalist who had asked her if she would ensure that all emails and WhatsApps would be retained. You can view it here

“I also knew that anything of any relevance or substance would be properly recorded in the Scottish government system,” she replies.

She says that she wants to underline that in her case “that communication” [WhatsApp] was extremely limited and would not apply to matters of substantive decision making.

But that wasn’t the question that Channel 4 had asked her, Dawson says.

Sturgeon apologises if her answer to the journalist was not “as clear” and wants to give the inquiry a “personal assurance” that the inquiry has “everything and everything” germane to her decision making during the crisis.

Sturgeon says she can’t recall receiving an email which a Scottish government civil servant had sent out with a “do not destroy notification for members of the administration to remind them to retain records.

“I do not. As far as I am aware I did not receive that,” Sturgeon tells Dawson, who goes on to suggest she would recall if such a communication was sent out.

“I don’t think I would have required to see that to know that matters that were relevant, matters of substance, salient matters that would be relevant to the inquiry … should be retained.”

WhatsApp had become – maybe – too common a means of communication in government, says Sturgeon.

But she insists that government decisions were not being taken on the platform.

One of the reasons why she doesn’t believe it should be used for government decision making is that when politicians make public statements they should think very carefully about the scope for what they say being misinterpreted.

“When you send things on WhatsApp you sometimes don’t think – including me – very carefully about how they can be interpreted,” she adds.

Speaking about previous messages which the inquiry has seen, Sturgeon says she is not sure if she has seen any messages which contained material that the Scottish public would not otherwise have seen.

“It might be for the Scottish public to judge,” interjects Jamie Dawson KC, for the inquiry.

“Of course,” replies Sturgeon, who insists that it was an “open conversation” with the public throughout the pandemic.

The WhatsApp issue has come up with haste and Sturgeon says that she was never a member of any Whatsapp groups and interacted through “informal messaging systems” with no more than a dozen people.

Principally, she would have communicated with her former chief of staff Liz Lloyd and Humza Yousaf, her successor as Scotland’s First Minister and SNP leader but who was a member of her government at the time.

Communication of that nature was not used by me for anything other than routine exchanges and would have been “littered” with things like “there’s a note coming from me to you.”

Sturgeon says she operated on the basis that she would ensure that anything in communications of an important nature was otherwise recorded on the Scottish government system.

Is it still your position today that you and the Scottish government were open “open, transparent and accountable” not just in your actions but in your words?, asks Jamie Dawson KC

“Yes, that is still my position. Openess and transparency with the Scottish public was very important to me from the outset,” says Sturgeon.

There will have been misjudgements and there will have been – on reflection – instances on which we could have done better, she adds.

“You are Nicola Sturgeon,” the former SNP leader is asked after she takes her seat.

“I am..”

And with that the questioning is underway. Sturgeon confirms she has provided some additional material to the inquiry last week, in addition to her earlier statements.

Question immediately focuses on communications during the pandemic.

Nicola Sturgeon gives evidence at UK Covid inquiry

Ben Quinn

Nicola Sturgeon, the former Scottish First Minister, is appearing before the Covid Inquiry in Edinburgh in what is the biggest day of the probe’s focus on that part of the UK.

For long the pre-eminent figure in Scottish politics, Sturgeon has experienced a dramatic fall from grace in the time since she was at the helm of her government’s response to the pandemic.

But while she was lauded by many at the time, she faces a range of awkward questions during an examination that is likely to see her draw on all of her experience as a lawyer and political representative.

Those questions are likely to cover the following areas, and more:

The inquiry has previously heard that the former SNP leaded did not retain any of her WhatsApp messages. Why?

Sturgeon had pledged to hand over all of her communications from the pandemic. In what circumstances did they disappear or were deleted?

Guidance on the use of WhatsApp was issued by the Scottish government in 2021. Did she follow those rules and, if not, why not?

Sturgon has been accused of seeking to use the pandemic as a way of leveraging support for Scottish independence. Did she seek to deliberately engage in a politically self-serving row with the UK government over issues such as the Furlough Scheme?

This covering her answers to those questions – and anything else – on this liveblog, along with in-person reporting at the Inquiry from my colleagues Severin Carrell and Libby Brooks.