No wonder tearful Nicola Sturgeon was dressed for a funeral – her reputation was being buried

In the end, her tears came bitterly. Not the crocodile emotions of the skilled public weeper, but those of a broken little armadillo.

“I wanted to be the best first minister I could be during that period,” said Nicola Sturgeon, voice wobbling. Her eyes brimmed, and a child’s voice carried on. “It’s for others to judge the extent to which I succeeded.”

It was perhaps telling that the moment Scotland’s formidable former leader finally cracked was not while mulling the Covid death toll she oversaw, but when pondering her own place in history.

She arrived at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre to give evidence to the Covid inquiry, dressed for an Essex drug-family funeral, swathed in dark attire but for a pair of white stilettos and a glittery brooch. Although it was still dark when she arrived two hours early, bereaved relatives were lurking outside and bellowed “excess deaths!” and other angry taunts. Eyes fixed ahead, the armadillo ran the gauntlet past them all.

Taking the stand, she looked determined and declared, in a clear voice, “solemnly, sincerely and truly”, to tell the truth. This was the first minister we remembered from the pandemic: confident, unwavering, nerveless at centre stage.

“You are Nicola Sturgeon?” asked Jamie Dawson KC, her main antagonist for the session. “I am,” she replied, head erect.

Dawson is, hard to believe, as dashing a KC as Hugo Keith, his English counterpart. A saltire-blue tie glowed over a dark suit cut slightly more generously than svelte Keith requires. His face is a tad more lived-in, but crowned with sandy hair waxed and backswept to matinee-idol perfection. He could be cast to play Keir Starmer in a movie.

He got to business, asking her to explain the deletion of all her WhatsApp messages during the crisis. Hadn’t she known, when she promised a journalist she would hand everything over to the inquiry, that “those messages had been destroyed”?

Sturgeon, it turns out, was shredding records faster than the last spook out of the Saigon embassy. Her attempts to smooth over this crime against history were rather preposterous. She never used WhatsApp for government business, and it wasn’t really destruction but “a process” to check everything went to the proper channels.

This was so opaque that Dawson had to ask: “Did you delete them?”

“Yes,” replied the former first minister, as though the dull boy at the back of class had finally got it.

Even less convincingly, she argued that phones get lost or stolen. That might have held water if her social media messages were stuffed with secrets, but she went out of her way to assure the KC they were mainly mundane stuff like “Can I pop in and see you?”.

Dawson produced several exchanges, culled from the phones of people who did not routinely delete all their messages, that seemed to paint the opposite picture.

One of the best was a policy-heavy chat WhatsApp chat with Liz Lloyd, her chief aide, before a cabinet meeting. “Having a bit of a crisis in decision-making,” said Nicola, “not helped by I haven’t slept”. Some new pub opening hours seemed “a bit random” and should be changed. Liz patiently explained why they were OK and offered to get her boss a Starbucks.

Then there were exchanges with sympathetic academic Devi Sridhar, who later reportedly became her personal trainer. Sturgeon admitted that Sridhar privately sent her reports from her Covid group.

Everyone else seemed to be using WhatsApp for banter and policy chat. Most amusing was a message from top official Ken Thomson who reminded colleagues their exchanges were “discoverable under FOI [freedom of information]. Know where the ‘clear chat’ button is. Plausible deniability are my middle names”. Sturgeon said, fairly, that humour helped “get them through the day”.

Also funny was Sturgeon’s ploddy successor Humza Yousaf messaging pals about having his ear torn off in cabinet. “Ack… her ranting at me isn’t the problem. I can take it.”

This latter vignette was relevant to a second key line of inquiry, whether Sturgeon was genuinely the collegiate leader she claims to be, or took decisions in secretive small groups outside the formal cabinet. Yousaf, it was suggested, had challenged the preordained line. Sturgeon denied the claim, despite the revelation of a “gold command” of trustees who seemed to carve up decisions with no official records kept at all.

Finance minister Kate Forbes didn’t even know it existed. Some handwritten notes by Lloyd of a gold command meeting were then beamed onto the screen, showing detailed discussions, including of “political” opportunities to embarrass Boris Johnson’s government.

Sturgeon’s technique, when confronted with awkward evidence, was to pause, look baffled that ignorant people should question her goodness, then explain at length that she was dutiful, transparent and collegiate at all times.

Asked about Michael Gove’s accusations of political trickery, she sounded weary and got a bit teary again, recalling feeling “overwhelmed with what we were dealing with”.

Yes, she had regrets, like not locking down early enough. But politics never came into it: “I was motivated solely by trying to do the best we could to keep people as safe as possible.”

Dawson’s final question was vicious. Adapting words from a bereaved Covid campaigner, he asked: “The story of Covid in Scotland is the story of the hubris of Nicola Sturgeon, is it not?”

She flinched, blinked and breathed hard. “No,” she replied, eyes filling again. “I am deeply sorry to each and every person who suffered. I did my best. My government did our best.”

Without those deleted WhatsApp messages, she might have won the benefit of the doubt. But like that luxury campervan parked in her in-laws’ drive, it simply demanded a proper explanation.

No wonder Nicola Sturgeon dressed for a funeral. Her reputation for plain dealing was being quietly buried.