Do WhatsApp revelations mean Scotland’s government is as bad as Westminster?

As it emerges that WhatsApp messages were deleted by senior SNP ministers, Sean O’Grady looks at the fractious relationship between Edinburgh and London

Nicola Sturgeon with her former deputy, John Swinney (PA Wire)

Revelations from the Covid inquiry suggest the Scottish government could sometimes be as cronyistic, secretive and foul-mouthed as the one in Whitehall. It was also arguably quite as prone to playing politics with the pandemic as its counterpart in London.

The latest news is that the former deputy first minister and pandemic minister, John Swinney, manually deleted WhatsApp messages, just as some figures in London had.

The inquiry, still chaired by former judge Baroness Hallett but presently sitting in Edinburgh, also heard that the Scottish finance minister at the time, Kate Forbes, wasn’t invited to so-called “gold command” meetings and Ms Forbes was “not even sure” they existed at the time.

She also noted the lack of minutes taken at these top-level meetings, in contrast to cabinets. It certainly doesn’t amount to an SNP masterclass in good government at a time of crisis. The evidence lately given by Michael Gove and others also points to a fractious relationship between Edinburgh and London. 

How bad did it get?

We will learn some more on Wednesday when Nicola Sturgeon answers questions about her account of things. Or perhaps not, given her proven verbose habits and reliance on bureaucratese. Sturgeon is, after all, a solicitor by training and gave little away during various interrogations and allegations about her predecessor Alex Salmond’s time in office. 

From what we know so far, it is plain that there was an unusually poor chemistry at work between Boris Johnson, a self-created caricature of a particular type of amateurish upper-class Tory Englishman, and Nicola Sturgeon, who had few such pretensions and saw herself as a sharp-suited Nordic social democrat.

To no one’s surprise, we learned last week that Sturgeon regarded the prime minister as a “f****** clown”. Admittedly hardly alone, she found his confused and confusing announcement of the second Covid lockdown “excruciating” and viewed as “utter incompetence”.

Partly in reaction, Sturgeon made sure her own press conferences were better run and clearer, with the clear implication that the Covid crisis merely showed how much better off Scotland would be if it were independent. London, in turn, was reluctant to share some confidential data and decisions because they feared she would try to get her announcement out first. 

What’s wrong with different approaches?

Such competition between administrations to be the best at their respective responses could be a good thing, but often it seems it degenerated into finding and exploiting trivial areas of difference, while, for example, consistent UK-wide national messaging might have been preferable, given the overlap in contemporary media. 

Michael Gove, nominally in charge of relations with the devolved administrations, in his answers suggested that she used the pandemic for her own ends and to seek out conflict: “Of course, it is the case the SNP has a political mission to achieve Scotland’s independence, ie destroy the United Kingdom.”

Gove added that it would be “naive” to think “highly skilled politicians”, including Sturgeon, would not seek “political advantage at certain points”. However, that was just as true as the highly skilled politicians in London, who could look with scorn on their counterparts. For his part, Matt Hancock, as health secretary, thought the Scots should stick to “fat fighting” and leave “public health emergencies” to ministers in Westminster.

It didn’t help either that Johnson was unwilling to attend convocations with his devolved counterparts, lest they resemble the EU’s Council of Ministers, and suggest a spurious federal UK was emerging from the crisis. He also reportedly referred to the first minister of Scotland as “that bloody wee Jimmy Krankie woman”. 

What damage was done to public health?

Again, it’s difficult to be precise at this stage. However, we may be assured that Hallett and her team will make a mature judgment about the consequences of all these frictions. The same goes for the administration in Wales, where the Labour first minister, Mark Drakeford, appears to have had better relations with his UK/English counterparts. 

Has it damaged the SNP?

Well, the present leader seems to think so. Under cross-examination, the first minister Humza Yousaf, cut a rather sorry figure, conceding that there are “challenges” in relation to how WhatsApp has been used and that the handling of requests for WhatsApp messages had not been the government’s “finest hour”, and had not given bereaved families confidence. He also admitted the Scottish government’s handling of information was “frankly poor”.

How did the officials get along?

This is the really striking thing. From what has been learnt so far in the inquiry, and indeed was evident contemporaneously, the public health and scientific officials in all four parts of the UK worked together closely and harmoniously, with only minor variations in the advice they offered their respective political chiefs. They, at least, put patients and people before politics. Only the dismissal of the Scottish chief health adviser for a breach of lockdown rules early in the crisis spoils the picture of consummate collective professionalism. 

What are the lessons?

The most perplexing is that having an SNP administration in Scotland with a Conservative and Unionist party in power at the UK level is a recipe for trouble – though obviously bound to happen from time to time (given the Conservatives’ weakness in Scotland). Or. at least, that happens when two such governments are led by hyper-political personalities such as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nicola Sturgeon, then things are bound to go wrong. It was rather less antagonistic when Alex Salmond and David Cameron were thrown together by fate, and Cameron actually acceded to a request for the independence referendum that took place in 2014 (and didn’t settle anything). It may be that Brexit complicated and soured things irretrievably – Scotland voted Remain, as did Northern Ireland, while England and Wales respectively voted Leave. 

At any rate, the experience of devolution in the last few years does undermine the SNP argument that only by having a nationalist government at Holyrood and an overwhelming majority of SNP MPs at Westminster can Scotland get the best deal out of London. It rather suggests that such antagonism can do more harm than good – and brings independence no closer. Indeed, the SNP has a vested interest in balancing and antagonising London, whether justified or not, and that conceivably could harm Scotland’s interests.

Scots may even look back with some nostalgia to the early devolution era when there were Labour politicians in both capitals such as Donald Dewar and Tony Blair working more happily together on a shared agenda. It may happen again after the next UK general election this year and the Holyrood elections scheduled for 2026.