The Scotland secretary has dismissed Nicola Sturgeon’s raw emotions during her evidence to the Covid inquiry as insincere and false. “I thought she could cry from one eye if she wanted to,” Alister Jack told the inquiry on Thursday, as he acknowledged there were deep levels of distrust between him and senior Scottish government ministers. Sturgeon’s eyes filled with tears and her voice broke a number of times during her daylong testimony to the inquiry in Edinburgh on Wednesday, as she recounted how “incredibly stressful” she found it dealing with the “horrendous” effects of the pandemic.
Jack said his long experience of dealing with the then first minister made him extremely sceptical about the authenticity of her emotions. “I didn’t believe it for a minute,” he told Jamie Dawson KC, the inquiry’s Scottish counsel. He said tensions between the two administrations came into sharp relief on 12 March 2020. Sturgeon, to the alarm of UK cabinet ministers, had announced a ban in Scotland of mass gatherings of more than 500 people that day, hours before the UK’s other governments had verified the plan. Jack alleged the Scottish government then kept secret its knowledge of a significant Covid outbreak linked to a Nike conference in Edinburgh in February, where 36 people were infected. He and Matt Hancock had met Jeane Freeman, who at the time was Scotland’s health secretary, on the evening of 12 March but Freeman did not mention the Nike outbreak; Hancock first learned of it when news of it leaked later that summer.
Michael Gove, then a senior UK cabinet minister, told the inquiry on Monday that Sturgeon had “jumped the gun” by disclosing the ban first. Jack said her announcement also “breached confidentiality” because she revealed it was about to be discussed by Cobra, the UK government’s emergency committee. Jack was challenged by Dawson on whether the UK government was also secretive about its thinking and policy decisions, including plans by Rishi Sunak, the then chancellor, for the “eat out to help out” financial plan for restaurants. Jack confirmed he did not brief Sturgeon’s officials about the proposal. As an MP for a Scottish seat close to the English border, he said policy differences during Covid, on travel restrictions and local lockdowns, were “quite frustrating”. He accepted devolution existed but would rather all parts of the UK were aligned. “I thought the whole border thing was trying to appear that Scotland was a different country, a world apart,” he said. Dawson said the antipathy seemed personal. John Swinney, then Sturgeon’s deputy first minister, told the inquiry he could not tolerate Jack because of his behaviour before the pandemic. By contrast, Swinney said he got on very well with Jack’s predecessor, David Mundell. Jack agreed he had a poor relationship with Scottish ministers: he had taken four legal challenges against them over Scottish government policies. “Those tensions existed before the pandemic, during the pandemic and exist now today,” he said. Dawson pressed the Scottish secretary over why he deleted all his WhatsApp messages – a recurrent theme during the inquiry. Jack said he had to wipe his messages because in the first half of the pandemic he had a basic mobile with only 16GB of memory. He was advised to wipe all his WhatsApps, from his wife, his family, friends and colleagues, to allow the phone to work properly. He said he did not do government business by WhatsApp. “At the time, I didn’t think anything of it,” he said. Pressed on that later by Claire Mitchell KC, counsel for the Scottish Covid Bereaved group, Jack apologised. He said had he known then what he now knows about their significance, he would have solved his phone capacity problem another way. “I regret that I deleted my entire account,” he said. In closing submissions to the inquiry, which sat in Edinburgh for three weeks, Danny Friedman KC, representing two Scottish disabilities charities, said the Scottish government badly failed disabled people during the pandemic. It set up policy sub groups based on ethnicity and for children, but not people with disabilities. “The notion that no one should be left behind was effectively thwarted before the crisis started,” said Friedman.