The SNP’s Covid WhatsApp debacle

You have to hand it to the Scottish government: the deletion of WhatsApp messages is good preemptive news management, whether accidental, by default or deliberate. Once journalists get their hands on them, those curt, day-to-day messages can be just a tad embarrassing — as this week’s expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry confirms. The Scottish government may not, however, be subjected to the same level of message scrutiny. Just how many WhatsApps have been deleted we still do not know.

The Scottish government policy on message deletion was confirmed yesterday in a convoluted statement from the deputy first minister Shona Robison, which came just after Dominic Cummings had finished giving his expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry. Many of the more revealing comments by the government’s top science officers have been expressed in WhatsApp messages, including revelations that Professor Dame Angela McLean had dubbed Rishi Sunak ‘Dr Death’ and that Johnson suggested he thought Covid was ‘nature’s way of dealing with old people’.