Hero Worship and Covid (February 05, 2024)

SNP hero worshippers won't like it one bit, but Camilla Long's assessment of Sturgeon is spot on.

"Sturgeon, while talented, cannot cope with differing opinions: she descends into small, monocultural circles of advisers, who, during Covid, formed a preposterously named top-tier body, Gold Command, which didn’t even take minutes. 

"She and her deputy, John Swinney, decided to close schools without involving a single other person. As Leitch put it after one meeting: “She actually wants none of us.”

"In the end, all her East German secrecy and control made no difference: people still died. She made the same mistakes as Johnson. 

"It seems incredible to have to contemplate this, but in putting self-obsessed politicians in charge of Covid, were we in fact being led by people who were unable to be objective and were therefore the opposite of what we needed and deserved?"

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nicola-sturgeons-covid-inquiry-is-the-full-macbeth-gfnzvsgq5

Bloodshed and tears: Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid inquiry is the full Macbeth

By Camilla Long - The Sunday Times

Ihave watched quite a few days of the Covid hearings now — Boris, Rishi, Dom. All of them have different flavours: Boris — sheepish, sly; Rishi — silky, dull. Nicola Sturgeon, though: brrr. To say her appearance at the inquiry last week had an effect on me is to understate the pulsing, radioactive way in which she subtly, insistently, permanently rearranged my DNA.

After seven hours of, as Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, might put it, Sturgeon “overspeaking”, I felt physically drained. Who does that to sentences? Some of them had 12 clauses.

I think, by the end, after endless “assurances”, fretful jargon (“four nations’ preferred road” “slide packs” “working at pace”) and weaponised pleading (she just wanted to “keep people safe”), if she’d said Covid wasn’t real, and was in fact a deep-state plan by the Tories to obstruct independence, I’d have simply cried, nodded and said, “Yes, master.”

And she would have stepped over my dehydrated body, little faun heels clicking, and told everyone that she had the “utmost” respect for me and that I had showed the “highest professionalism” and “integrity”.

She said this about everyone, whether she loathed them or not (she mostly loathed them). Ken Thomson, one of Scotland’s most senior civil servants, was a man “of the utmost integrity” and “professionalism”, she cooed.

But he wasn’t, was he? He’s already had to resign for telling senior ministers that their text messages were “discoverable” under FoI: “Know where the ‘clear chat’ button is,” he guffawed in 2020. Other officials said that clearing chat was their “pre-bed ritual”. “Done,” chirruped the foot soldiers.

Och, said Nicola, they were just trying “to get themselves through the day”.

What?

This module of the Covid inquiry has been absolutely incredible. Tears, revelations, bloodshed. It’s been the full Macbeth to London’s limp Gilbert and Sullivan. Why is it so gripping? Well, there’s a reliably stupid cast of minor goons, including Sturgeon’s right-hand woman, Liz Lloyd, who referred to herself as Sturgeon’s “thought partner”, and Jason Leitch, the clinical director for the Scottish government (the “pre-bed ritual” guy). There’s a labyrinthine WhatsApp subplot in which the whole of the Scottish government appears to have North Sea-ed all messages for the first six months of the pandemic. No one seems to think there is anything wrong with that, but, unlike down in London, they did it industrially and as a matter of course — which makes it as bad, in my view, as care homes, in terms of scandal.

And then, finally, there is a hero: Jamie Dawson KC. This smooth Roger Moore tribute act runs rings around London’s Hugo Keith.

He had one job: cut through Sturgeon’s epic nonsense. She has a euphemism for everything: she didn’t “delete” her WhatsApp messages; she simply failed to “retain” them.

Did you delete them, he purred. “Yes,” she squeaked.

Later, she wept.

Not for the first time, as I lapped up these hypocrisies, I wondered if the drama wasn’t getting in the way. You could watch all of Sturgeon’s evidence and not get the slightest sense of what happened in Scotland during Covid. Is that a good thing? I saw Baroness Hallett taking notes — but what did she learn? Does she think, for example, that it’s important to know Sturgeon thinks Boris Johnson is a “f***ing clown”?

I don’t think it is. It’s neither controversial nor revelatory. It’s Sturgeon’s stated position: “Boris Johnson was the wrong person to be prime minister, full stop.” Given that many people would now agree with her — if anything, you’d be worried if she didn’t think that — what is its value? Nothing. So why is it the only thing we’re talking about?

As it happens, Scotland during Covid is worth studying: Sturgeon provides a useful counterpoint to Johnson. While the team in London was sitting around discussing “shooting” and partying, Sturgeon was working “seven days a week”. She did hundreds of daily briefing sessions, long after other leaders stopped. “I did my best,” she mewed. But did it make any difference? The answer is: it did not. Scotland’s mortality rate was not significantly lower than England’s. Why?

It turns out you can be the most competent, dedicated politician — and yet you are still a politician, and politicians were never the right people to deal with Covid. Like Johnson, Sturgeon did very little leading. She remained obsessed with independence: it became the “prism”, as Dawson put it, through which she saw everything. Just as Johnson could never stop thinking about himself, she could not stop thinking about her life’s work.

Look at the evidence: Sturgeon’s close circle was a toxic handful of true believers who sought to bring it up at every opportunity. In a cabinet meeting in June 2020 it was agreed they would consider restarting the independence campaign using “the coronavirus pandemic”.

This wasn’t some WhatsApp aside: it was in cabinet minutes. Naturally, Sturgeon tried to minimise this. Until this point she had been telling us that it was only cabinet minutes that mattered. Now she said they didn’t matter because “work did not restart”. Again, what?

I wonder if one of Hallett’s conclusions on “Module 2A (decision-making in Scotland)” might be: the wrong people were making decisions. Politicians, by nature, spend most of their time thinking about their own aims. Sturgeon, while talented, cannot cope with differing opinions: she descends into small, monocultural circles of advisers, who, during Covid, formed a preposterously named top-tier body, Gold Command, which didn’t even take minutes. She and her deputy, John Swinney, decided to close schools without involving a single other person. As Leitch put it after one meeting: “She actually wants none of us.”

In the end, all her East German secrecy and control made no difference: people still died. She made the same mistakes as Johnson. It seems incredible to have to contemplate this, but in putting self-obsessed politicians in charge of Covid, were we in fact being led by people who were unable to be objective and were therefore the opposite of what we needed and deserved?