Nicola Sturgeon ‘could cry from one eye if she wanted to,’ Alister Jack told the UK Covid Inquiry this morning. It was an interesting medical observation from the Scottish Secretary presumably intended to suggest that the former first minister’s emotional moments in her evidence yesterday were contrived. Sturgeon fought back tears a number of times when she insisted she just wanted ‘to be the best first minister I could be’ during the pandemic, resolute in her denials that she had had ulterior political motives.

‘I didn’t believe it for a minute,’ Jack, the Tory MP for Dumfries asserted, roundly accusing the former first minister of politicising the pandemic. Sturgeon had told the Covid Inquiry she’d had no knowledge of a cabinet minute, from June 2020, which indicated that the Scottish government was planning to restart the independence campaign ‘with the arguments reflecting the experience of the coronavirus crisis’.

Sturgeon was always on the lookout for ways to promote her country and her government. It’s what politicians do

So Jack claims this means the SNP government were trying to exploit the pandemic – and the Pope’s a Catholic. Sturgeon has devoted her life to the cause of independence and it is ludicrous to suppose that she somehow parked her passion during the pandemic. She was always on the lookout for ways to promote her country and her government. It’s what politicians do.

Let’s not forget that the UK government was doing exactly the same: trying to assess the risk to the Union during the pandemic and attempting to mitigate that risk. We know this from Michael Gove’s ‘State of the Union’ presentation to cabinet in July 2020. He told ministers that ‘protecting and strengthening the Union must be a cornerstone of all that we do’. Jack even echoed this in his own evidence this morning: ‘My job is to go out and strengthen the United Kingdom and sustain the United Kingdom,’ he told Jamie Dawson KC, ‘I do that every day of my working life.’

Jack went on to complain that the Scottish government ‘always tried to do things slightly differently’. So what? That’s almost an exact definition of devolution: Scottish solutions to Scottish problems. There were the petty rows about furlough and Eat Out to Help Out; these were obviously about two governments trying to get the better of each other. Again, what would anyone expect from politicians?

Boris Johnson himself admitted that he had only made masks compulsory in English schools in 2020 because he was told it was ‘not worth an argument’ with Sturgeon. The former PM’s visit to Scotland in July 2020 was transparently political as he lectured about the ‘merits of the Union’. So to see Jack now accusing the Scottish government of ‘political manoeuvres’ is risible after he had admitted to doing the same thing.

The Scottish Secretary did not do himself or the Scottish Conservatives any favours in his curiously overwrought evidence today. His attack on Sturgeon’s crying was unnecessarily crude. Worse, he admitted that, just like Sturgeon, he had deleted all his WhatsApp messages in 2021. He said he did so to free up storage capacity on his phone and now regrets it. He, like Sturgeon, was also adamant that he did not ‘govern by WhatsApp’. But no one can ever be sure of that now, can they?

This makes it extremely difficult for the Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross to continue to attack Sturgeon for deleting hers. If she can be accused of ‘cover up’ then so, apparently, can the Scottish Secretary. What important discussions with UK ministers and Boris Johnson have been lost as a result of his recklessness? It is true that Jack didn’t actually promise to keep them as Sturgeon famously did on Channel 4 News in August 2021. But that doesn’t change the fact that he still looks guilty of erasing an important part of the official record.

First Minister Humza Yousaf rounded on Douglas Ross over this at First Minister’s Questions today accusing the Scottish Tory leader of ‘hypocrisy’ in attacking Sturgeon for doing what both Jack and the former prime minister Johnson had themselves been doing. Ross tried to recover by insisting that Jack had apologised for deleting his WhatsApps while Nicola Sturgeon had not, and that she had claimed it was Scottish government policy to delete messages. But the thrust of his whole ‘cover up’ accusation has been lost. The SNP may be confident that the WhatsApp issue has now been fully explained. Whether the many bereaved Scottish relatives who have been attending the inquiry will agree remains to be seen.