As I wrote last year, the British model for conducting public inquiries is in many ways deeply sub-optimal. It tries to do too many things at once, and in the end sacrifices speed and efficiency in evidence-gathering in favour of spectacle and, in theory, catharsis.
Nicola Sturgeon’s testimony before the Covid Inquiry today was precisely the sort of theatre the system is all but designed to produce. The decision-maker, the big beast, dragged into the spotlight and subjected to questioning. The mighty held to account.
Or the once-mighty, at least. The ponderous pace of inquiries means many of the key decision-makers are no longer in post when their turn comes around, and the former first minister is no different. She is almost a year since departed office, and in that time has seen her reputation demolished, both by the police investigation into the SNP’s finances and recent revelations about her government’s secretive conduct during the pandemic.
That last, of course, came up today, and is a useful illustration of the limitations of spectacle. In 2021, Sturgeon gave a clear commitment that she would make her WhatsApp messages available to a future inquiry. She must have known, then, that this was a lie, because she wasn’t keeping them.
Today, Sturgeon merely apologised that her 2021 answer was “not as clear” as it might have been, a bog-standard political evasion.
A black-box inquiry, taking evidence behind closed doors, might usefully have learned why she decided to delete her messages. Or why she and Jane Freeman, then health secretary, apparently purchased burner phones at the start of the pandemic. Or why meetings of the so-called Gold Command, the inner circle Sturgeon convened to coordinate the response to Covid, were unminuted.
Yet no honest explanation for any of that was ever going to be given, first-hand, in front of the watching nation. Instead we have theatre, and debates about whether or not the former first minister’s tears were genuine.
As such, the testimony itself is not really telling us much that hasn’t already been revealed by reports in the media. Nor is it really much of a surprise that, for example, the Scottish Government didn’t end up handling the pandemic noticeably better than Westminster, or that Sturgeon ran a secretive, imperial style of government.
The mere fact that she and her ministers, civil servants, and advisers chose to delete their messages suggests its own story, of course. They must have known that it would come to light, and that there would be an almighty backlash. They nonetheless judged it better to delete the trail.
And there remain many interesting avenues left to pursue, such as the nature of the relationship between the SNP and expert advisers such as Devi Sridhar, who served on the Scottish Government’s Covid advisory group and who during the pandemic authored numerous op-eds on how Edinburgh and London were handling things.
Today, Sturgeon downplayed suggestions that Sridhar had cleared her lines with her – although she did not deny it outright. But to a casual observer, it seemed pretty clear at the time that the latter only tended to appear in the press when she had a flattering light to cast on the efforts of the Scottish Government.
If the chances of meaningful insights into the conduct of government during the pandemic are slim, however, the political consequences are not. Once again, Labour benefits from its status as a double-challenger to two incumbent parties.
Partygate and the fallout from it deeply damaged the Conservatives, and the recent rash of revelations about the SNP’s handling of the pandemic north of the border may yet have a similar affect on the already-embattled nationalists. As Boris Johnson learned to his cost, the pandemic cut deeply into the national consciousness, and scandals over misconduct in handling it can land very hard with people who lost loved ones, or indeed who suffered from such prolonged disruption to normal, social life.
And when it comes to independence – revealed again to be the only thing that really animates the SNP when Sturgeon’s chief of staff was revealed to have wanted “a good old-fashioned rammy” with London at the height of the crisis – all this further corrodes the reputation of a whole generation of the Nationalists’ senior leadership, figures with no equals amongst their successors and who might, in other circumstances, have yet been important assets to a future Yes campaign.
For now, however, such a campaign seems a very remote prospect. In the meantime, we are day by day getting a clearer, bleaker picture of how the SNP has governed Scotland. One can only hope that the Scottish electorate, at some point, will have had enough.