Nicola Sturgeon at the Covid inquiry: by turns defensive, lawyerly and very raw

Trust in the former first minister has ebbed since the height of the pandemic. Evidence in Edinburgh revealed a presidential leadership style that came to exhaust her

Nicola Sturgeon cut a solitary figure as she walked into the UK Covid inquiry on Wednesday morning, sombre-suited and met by shouts of “Where are your WhatsApps?”

Over three weeks of evidence taken in Edinburgh, the inquiry had heard from those who worked most closely with Scotland’s former first minster during the pandemic, and the picture pieced together – often with some difficultly given the paucity of detail forthcoming from the Scottish government – was a troubling one: mass deletion of informal messages by senior figures, unminuted “gold command” meetings headed by Sturgeon that appeared to bypass cabinet decision-making, jokes from key civil servants about the suppression of information, accusations of politicising the pandemic to further the cause of independence.