Cole-Hamilton sets out 10 questions for Sturgeon to answer

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP has today set out ten questions for Nicola Sturgeon to answer following the revelations uncovered through evidence heard at the UK Covid Inquiry last week that the former First Minister deleted all her Covid WhatsApps and locked others out of decision-making.

Scottish Liberal Democrats are now calling on the former First Minister to answer the following questions:  

• Why did you break your promise to parliament and the national media (and by extension families bereaved by covid) by deleting WhatsApps after giving them an explicit undertaking to retain and submit all of your private messages to the Covid inquiry?

• How many messages had you already deleted when you gave that false assurance in 2021, how many did you delete afterwards, and did you erase messages manually or through the use of autodelete?

• Why did you allow guidance to be issued which some ministers interpreted as allowing for the deletion of crucial messages which you knew would be of critical interest to the inevitable public inquiry, and who made the decision to issue this guidance?  

• Was your pandemic response shaped at any point by a simple desire to be different from and stoke animosity with the UK government?

• Why were the so-called ‘Gold Command’ meetings, which took place throughout the pandemic between you and those at the very top of government, never minuted?  

• Do you accept that by not minuting these Gold-Command meetings you may have breached the Scottish Ministerial Code, which clearly states that such meetings should always be minuted?  

• What measure was used to determine the ‘salient points’ of business discussions that the guidance stated should be transcribed from messages into an email or text document?

• Do you believe that in reducing the number of participants in key decisions, opportunities for collaboration, and robust testing of decisions, were missed?  

• Why were private mobile phones and emails used to conduct public government business, and how many more people did you give your private email out to?

• Why were Covid positive and untested patients released into care homes? What discussions took place around this policy and who was consulted in advance of the decision being taken?

Mr Cole-Hamilton said:  

“Nicola Sturgeon’s government was making life and death decisions. There are no guarantees that Covid was the last pandemic we will face. The ability to learn lessons for next time is being shattered by chaotic record keeping, a failure to properly log the context of decisions and the indefensible mass deletion of messages at the top of government.  

“The fragments of messages revealed by the inquiry have already shown that key decisions were being deliberated and taken over WhatsApp, while public health officials and members of her own cabinet were kept out of the loop.  

“Bereaved families have been left in the lurch, grappling with the reality that they may never get the full picture they are so desperately fighting for.

“There are huge questions for Nicola Sturgeon to answer this week. In the interests of all those grieving and all those failed, I hope she will use her appearance at the inquiry to address the issues my party has set out.”