“Openness and transparency with the Scottish public was very important to me,” Nicola Sturgeon, dressed in a funereal black, assured the Covid Inquiry. So important, it turns out, that she took a great deal of care what she was open and transparent about.

Has any leader from the Covid years had such a marked fall from grace as Sturgeon? Sure, Boris Johnson’s reputation has been pretty comprehensively trashed but, let’s face it, it wasn’t in great shape even at the start of 2020. Whereas Sturgeon was feted when she walked off into the sunset last year to spend more time being an auntie helping the police with their inquiries. She was, we were told, a model leader, going at a time of her own choosing, an example to others. 

It was classic Sturgeon, pitching herself as the grown-up in the room, the refreshing contrast to the clown-show that people less fortunate than the Scots had been forced to endure

That’s not a take which has aged well. These days for Sturgeon it’s just one thing after another. Obviously, there’s the camper van and the party funds, but this month, it’s her WhatsApps. Or, more accurately, it’s not, because there aren’t any. It turns out that Sturgeon doesn’t have any private messages from the pandemic period. 

Well that, of course, was simple, she told Jamie Dawson, counsel to the inquiry, on Wednesday morning. “Informal communications were not in any sense an extensive or meaningful part of the way I conducted government business,” she explained. And that’s that. She didn’t use WhatsApp, or Twitter DMs, or any of that nonsense which turns out to have been so beloved of other, less serious, more London-based administrations. 

Perhaps, Sturgeon conceded, she did use WhatsApp but with “probably no more than a handful of  people”. She was “never a member of any WhatsApp groups”. Any discussion of government policy on her phone had been “extremely limited”. More than that, “WhatsApp had become, in my opinion, probably a too-common element of decision-making.”

It was classic Sturgeon, pitching herself as the grown-up in the room, the refreshing contrast to the clown-show that people less fortunate than the Scots had been forced to endure, with Shouty Genius Dominic Cummings and Shopping Trolley Johnson and Shagging Matt Hancock, running around making policy in private chats and then deleting the evidence.

Although, and here’s the funny thing, it turns out that, now and then, Sturgeon did use WhatsApp to discuss government policy. It’s hard to know how often because somehow — we would come to learn how — the messages are no longer on her phone. Or indeed on anyone else’s phone. This may or may not be related to the policy of bedtime WhatsApp deletion practised by at least one Scottish official. 

By definition, if it hadn’t been recorded, it wasn’t relevant. And who are we to argue the relevance of messages that we can’t see? 

Sturgeon was asked about this, and the fact that a senior civil servant had privately remarked that “plausible deniability” was his middle name. She wasn’t aware of that, she said, because she wasn’t in the message group where it happened. When it comes to plausible deniability, she has deniability. Perhaps it’s even plausible. 

She was asked about later in the exchange between them, where it looked like the same civil servant seemed to be joking about ways around information laws. She was very quiet now. “That’s an interpretation that could be put on it.” She assured us that the civil servant in question took these laws “extremely seriously”. Of course, bank robbers take the law seriously, too. That’s why they go to such lengths to avoid being caught.

Anyway, she explained, all this was missing the point. There was no attempt to cover things up, because “anything of salience, relevance, substance to the decision-making would be properly recorded”. By definition, if it hadn’t been recorded, it wasn’t relevant. And who are we to argue the relevance of messages that we can’t see? 

Quite a lot of things weren’t relevant, we learned. The “Gold” meetings ahead of Cabinet meetings where Sturgeon and a couple of others would hash out their positions weren’t relevant, she said. The decisions were taken in Cabinet, and they were minuted. There are no minutes of the Gold meetings, so they can’t have been relevant.

There’s a line attributed — wrongly — to Otto von Bismarck, that laws are like sausages: the public shouldn’t see how they get made. This, it became clear, is Sturgeon’s view. Her government was transparent because it told people the decisions it had reached. Here are your bangers and mash, don’t ask any questions, the ingredients arrived looking like that. 

Several times she said that she had obviously been open about what was going on, because she’d given daily press conferences. This brought us neatly to one of those, in August 2021, when she’d been specifically asked whether she would turn over her WhatsApps, and had replied, apparently affronted at the very suggestion that she would keep a secret, that of course she would. 

There had been very few messages. So few, she implied, that they’d been impossible to keep track of

Viewers might have got the impression from this that she was holding onto all her messages. The reality was, presumably, neither salient, relevant nor substantial. She explained to Dawson that she had been “trying to answer the substance of the question”. She conceded that if you looked at “the literal terms of the answer”, it could be read as a pledge to keep her private messages. She could, generously, see how someone might have made that mistake. 

 “I apologise if that answer was not as clear,” she said, though the problem with her answer hadn’t been that it wasn’t clear. In fact it was very clear, it was just that it was clearly false.

The thing was, Sturgeon went on, “it is not possible — and I’m not even sure it is desirable to good governance — to record every single word”. People needed to be able to think out loud without anyone — an inquiry, for instance — looking over their shoulder. 

Dawson listed 12 people she’d used “informal communications” with. Sturgeon once again insisted that this had happened rarely. There had been very few messages. So few, she implied, that they’d been impossible to keep track of.  

“But,” Dawson pushed, there had been messages. “Did you delete them?”

Finally, tetchily, we got the answer: “Yes.”