The SNP’s position on providing contemporaneous WhatsApp messages appears like it might have been influenced by the recent experiences by some of their former senior people in, ahem, assisting the police with their enquiries.
But it’s difficult to know for certain as the position is very confusing.
First, Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon states that there is ‘nothing to see here folks’ as she says she was not part of any WhatsApp groups dealing with Covid and so has no relevant messages. She says she managed the Scottish government’s approach to Covid in a traditional manner from her desk at Bute House.
So far, so opaque. Were there contemporaneous notes taken of the meetings and calls that she participated in, as would be standard practice in England? Also, not being part of any WhatsApp groups is not exactly the same thing as not having sent or received any WhatsApp messages from individuals. Perhaps Ms Sturgeon can clarify this point.
Adding to the mess has been the intervention of unintentionally comedic “new” SNP leader and now First Minister Hamza Yousef, a product of Hutchesons’ Grammar School, an elite private school in Glasgow whose alumni seem to dominate the upper echelons of the “people’s party”.
First, he stated that there was an official policy of deleting all WhatsApp messages, which seems to be the first anyone has heard of that being official Scottish government policy and begs the question of why it is policy to destroy potentially important government records. But then he said that it was ok because he had kept all of his messages and would disclose them to both the U.K. and Scottish enquiries.
One could almost conclude that he has made up a policy only to then immediately breach it himself. Not exactly what you expect from a freshman First Minister. It’s almost as if he has taken the derogatory comments of his opponents, “Hamza Useless”, as a sort of personal challenge.
Finally, if one pulls back from the oddness and contradictions of the whole thing, a hypothetical becomes glaringly apparent.
Imagine for a moment that this was the other way round and that Ms Sturgeon and Mr Yousef had meticulously kept all electronic communications intact and then promptly and without redaction disclosed them to both enquiries. And continue to imagine that Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and others around No.10 at the time had refused to disclose their WhatsApp messages or claimed that they had been destroyed pursuant to some hitherto unknown policy. Just imagine what the SNP would now be saying.
More than 20 years ago the right to silence in criminal cases was abolished in English courts, replaced by the right of a court of the jury to infer matters from the failure of a witness to provide reasonable explanations of relevant questions that are put to them. I think the SNP is about to discover that the right to silence has been abolished in politics too.
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