Sturgeon could ‘cry from one eye if she wanted to’, claims Scottish Secretary
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Nicola Sturgeon could “cry from one eye if she wanted to”, the Scottish Secretary has said, as he suggested she was faking tears at the Covid Inquiry.
Alister Jack said he “didn’t believe for a minute” that Ms Sturgeon had not sought to politicise the pandemic to boost the cause of independence, something she strongly denied when she gave evidence on Wednesday.
The Cabinet minister also accused the former first minister of bringing in different Covid rules for Scotland “for the sake of it” as part of a political agenda and claimed the SNP hid an early virus outbreak in Edinburgh from the British government.
Mr Jack was asked about a passage of Ms Sturgeon’s evidence, in which she became upset at the suggestion she had sought to seize upon the pandemic to boost support for independence.
She claimed that she had been able to put aside her constitutional convictions and insisted she had never thought about independence less than she had during the early days of the pandemic.
“I watched that yesterday, and I saw that passage, and I don’t believe it for a minute,” said Mr Jack. “I looked at that passage and I thought back on my experiences and looked at her performance, and I thought ‘she could cry from one eye if she wanted to’.”
The Scottish Secretary, who was in post for the entirety of the pandemic, said the SNP’s constitutional aims had created “tensions” throughout the crisis.
He claimed the Scottish Government would meet the UK Government and find out what its plans were, and then work out how it could do the same thing but “just slightly differently”.
Mr Jack said he believed this was a “political manoeuvre on their behalf”, adding: “My job is to go out and sustain and strengthen the United Kingdom, and I do that every day of my working life. She at the time saw her job as a leader of a nationalist government to break up the United Kingdom.
“That’s what the Scottish National Party exists to do. So it was inevitable that there would be tensions and there always are in government.
“Devolution works very well, but it works very well when governments want to work together. When one government wants to destroy the United Kingdom and destroy devolution, then there are tensions. Those tensions existed before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and they exist now today.”
During seven hours of evidence, Ms Sturgeon emphatically rejected the suggestion that she had sought to politicise the pandemic.
However, she was confronted with evidence that suggested otherwise. This included a cabinet minute from June 2020, which showed SNP ministers agreeing to consider “restarting work on independence and a referendum”. The document said the case for separation should be updated with “experience of the coronavirus crisis”.
Mr Jack also told the inquiry that he was not told about a Covid outbreak at a Nike conference in Edinburgh in late February 2020. He had met Jeane Freeman, then the Scottish health secretary, and Matt Hancock, then the UK health secretary, in the city on March 12.
He said: “Another thing that had happened at that meeting that had come to light in May, that despite being with the health secretary for two hours, at no point did she mention that they had discovered an outbreak at the Nike conference in Edinburgh.”
He said that Mr Hancock only discovered the outbreak when newspapers had contacted him about it.
