All Nicola Sturgeon's WhatsApp messages during the pandemic appear to have been deleted, the UK Covid inquiry has heard. Jamie Dawson KC, counsel to the inquiry, said the former first minister appeared to 'have retained no messages whatsoever'. The hearing in Edinburgh was also told that her deputy John Swinney's WhatsApp messaging was set to auto-delete.
Ms Sturgeon has previously said she has 'nothing to hide' but not clarified if her WhatsApp messages were deleted. The inquiry, sitting in Scotland for three weeks, was taking evidence from senior civil servant Lesley Fraser, director general corporate at the Scottish government. She said relatively new technologies such as Zoom were being used and that records may not have been retained in the way they might be now.
Mr Dawson questioned her about a table supplied by the Scottish government last October summarising ministers' use of notebooks and retention of messages. He said: 'Under the box 'Nicola Sturgeon', it says that messages were not retained, they were deleted in routine tidying up of inboxes or changes of phones, unable to retrieve messages.' Ms Fraser confirmed the government had been unable to supply Ms Sturgeon's messages from its corporate record.
The inquiry also heard from retired civil servant Ken Thomson, who said electronic messaging grew rapidly during the pandemic. He denied there was a culture among Covid decision-makers of deleting messages to prevent them coming into the public domain. In one WhatsApp group post in May 2021, he wrote: 'I feel moved at this point to tell you that this chat is FOI-recoverable.' Two minutes later, Prof Jason Leitch responded: 'WhatsApp deletion is a pre-bed ritual.'
Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said Ms Sturgeon and Mr Swinney had 'huge questions' to answer, accusing them of defying the inquiry's instructions to retain messages. He described the deletion as 'a digital torching of vital evidence'. Scottish Labour's Jackie Baillie said Ms Sturgeon had broken her promise to keep correspondence for future inquiries.
