The SNP’s Covid reckoning

We now know from evidence to the Covid Inquiry that Scottish government ministers were as prone to offensive language as Dominic Cummings. Nicola Sturgeon called Boris Johnson a ‘f***ing clown’, and Humza Yousaf called a Labour MSP a ‘twat’. If the government’s mass deletion of WhatsApp messages was designed to insulate it from embarrassment, it clearly hasn’t worked. 

The SNP-supporting legions on social media are of course outraged that anyone should be upset at the language politicians use in private. Everyone thought Boris was a clown, so what’s the issue here? It’s not as if they were having parties in Bute House, is it? And these revelations might seem trivial compared to the other fatal mistakes made by the Scottish government in handling the pandemic – like decanting the untested elderly into care homes for example. But they do matter, if only because of the way the Scottish government revelled in the embarrassment of UK ministers last autumn when sleek Hugo Keith KC was relishing the opportunity to refer to ‘f***pigs’ and suchlike on live TV.