Sturgeon admits errors in handling of ‘incredibly stressful’ Covid pandemic
Nicola Sturgeon has admitted failing to properly record key discussions about the Covid crisis after being pressed at the UK Covid inquiry over claims some decisions were too centralised and secretive.
The former first minister, who led Scotland’s response to the pandemic, pushed back tears when she admitted she found the pressure of crisis “incredibly stressful”, and at times wished she had not been in charge.
“I was the first minister when the pandemic struck,” she said, her voice breaking. “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 I could be during that period.”
Under close questioning from Jamie Dawson KC, the inquiry’s counsel, Sturgeon admitted she made a number of errors in her handling of policymaking and some of the key decisions taken during the crisis.
Those included:
An admission that crucial discussions with her closest advisers during private “gold command” meetings should have been recorded.
She regretted not telling people about Scotland’s first outbreak, involving 38 cases linked to a Nike conference in Edinburgh in March 2020, as that “had the potential to undermine public confidence”.
She acknowledged she should not have promised journalists in August 2021 that all her WhatsApp messages would be kept, knowing she had been systematically deleting them.
It was inappropriate for her to give the public health expert Devi Sridhar her private SNP email address.
She “thought wrongly” that her chief medical officer, Catherine Calderwood, could remain in post after admitting she breached lockdown rules by visiting her holiday home.
Sturgeon “strongly refuted” repeated suggestions from Dawson there was a deliberate effort on her part to centralise and control key decisions. She said any mistakes were unintentional, driven by the intense pace and significance of the events that were unfolding.
“I did not operate on any issue at any point of the Covid pandemic in a way that sought to exclude people from decision-making,” she said.
“I tried to lead from the front. I tried to shoulder my fair share, sometimes deliberately more than my fair share of the burden of decision-making given the severity and the difficulty of the decisions that were being made. I thought that was appropriate for a first minister.”
Dawson pressed Sturgeon, who quit suddenly as first minister last February in part, she said, because of the immense pressures of the Covid crisis, on why her regular gold group meetings were not minuted, and why only a small group of ministers and advisers took part.
It emerged on Tuesday that Sturgeon had failed to include Kate Forbes, then her finance secretary, in gold group meetings, which routinely took place before cabinet meetings. Forbes said she had known they existed only in early 2021.
Sturgeon denied Forbes was deliberately excluded but admitted those meetings were held with key advisers to help “shape” the policies and decisions she wanted to put to cabinet.
At one point, Dawson said Sturgeon “took a very firm grip over decision-making such that decisions about the management of the pandemic were made by you”.
The inquiry heard on Tuesday that Sturgeon and her deputy first minister, John Swinney, decided to shut all Scottish schools in March 2020 without telling the cabinet. Dawson then showed Sturgeon a WhatsApp exchange between her and her chief of staff, Liz Lloyd, which appeared to show them jointly deciding on a policy to ban alcohol consumption in public, before a cabinet meeting.
Sturgeon denied his suggestion that the Scottish cabinet largely existed simply to ratify her decisions. Cabinet meetings were robust and had real power, she said, and insisted the inquiry had all the material it needed to see how and why policy decisions were taken.
However, she admitted she enjoyed gold group meetings because she “didn’t have a great deal of patience” for large meetings with “a cast of unnecessary thousands”. She said: “I wanted to get all of the people with the right expertise in the room [during gold meetings] so that we could take the best decisions we possibly could.”
The inquiry has also been investigating whether the UK and Scottish governments made some decisions and undermined each other at times to shore up their competing campaigns for and against Scottish independence.
Sturgeon’s emotions broke through when Dawson asked her whether she had sought to exploit the crisis for political gain, believing that Boris Johnson, the then prime minister, was manifestly the wrong person to lead the UK during the crisis.
Dawson put it to her that she may have thought she was the best leader for Scotland since she had been health secretary during the previous swine flu pandemic. She said at the time she believed Johnson was trying to do his best as prime minister.
“At times in those early days, I felt overwhelmed by the scale of what we were dealing with,” her voice breaking. “And perhaps more than anything, I felt an overwhelming responsibility to do the best I could. So the idea that in those horrendous weeks, I was thinking of a political opportunity I find, well, it just wasn’t true.”