Nicola Sturgeon had a very rough time at the UK Covid-19 inquiry in Edinburgh yesterday. A sticky moment in particular was when Scottish cabinet minutes were raised showing that the former SNP leader and her senior ministers discussed how to marshal ‘the experience of the coronavirus crisis’ into a fresh campaign for independence, as Isabel Hardman wrote about here.
But there was another piece of evidence that was arguably more troubling. This was an email that was sent by the office of John Swinney, the former deputy first minister and second-in-command of the Scottish government during the pandemic. The email was addressed to Ken Thomson, then the top civil servant in the Scottish government who urged civil servants to ‘clear’ their messages because they were ‘discoverable under FOI’ and said ‘plausible deniability are my middle names.’ The email was also sent to the offices of the first minister (Nicola Sturgeon) and the justice secretary (Humza Yousaf), among others.
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