Humza Yousaf denies deleting his WhatsApps

The mystery of the missing WhatsApps gets murkier. The Scottish Sunday Mail revealed yesterday that Nicola Sturgeon ‘manually’ deleted WhatsApp messages from during the pandemic; her successor Humza Yousaf was one of the government figures who was reported as claiming that the relevant message data no longer exists. The First Minister denies this, however. ‘I’ve kept WhatsApp messages and fully intend to hand them over,’ Yousaf clarified today.

The media debate now centres around whether the Scottish Government had a policy on social media messaging in place — and when exactly the messages of senior figures were deleted. Yousaf has today shed light on the first of these questions. In an interview with the LBC, the First Minister startlingly revealed that the Scottish government ‘had a social media messaging policy’ which ‘actually required us to routinely delete WhatsApp messages’. An interesting way of demonstrating openness and transparency…