The inquiry is now shown messages between Sturgeon and Liz Lloyd, who served as chief of staff and a strategic adviser to Sturgeon, in which they discuss pub and restaurant restrictions.

In the messages, they they talk about what time pubs should be told to stop serving alcohol and how many people could go out in a group.

Dawson suggests this message would be "relevant" to someone who wants to know how decisions were made.

Sturgeon says she thinks everything in these messages would also be recorded in the official evidence of government decision-making.

Image source, PA Media

WhatsApp response being used to suggest Sturgeon has gone back on her wordpublished at 11:03 Greenwich Mean Time 31 January

11:03 GMT 31 January

David Wallace Lockhart
Political correspondent, reporting from the inquiry

Nicola Sturgeon has been asked about an exchange with Channel 4 News at one of her briefings where she said any inquiry would have access to her WhatsApp messages.

Her position is that she meant it would get access to the substance of anything significant from messages as that would go into the official record.

She goes on to apologise if that answer wasn’t as clear as it could’ve been.

That exchange with Channel 4 News has resurfaced recently and is being deployed by those who think the former FM has gone back on her word.

She’s given an explanation into how she interpreted her reply.

There will be those however who think that was a public assurance that Nicola Sturgeon didn’t deliver on.

Dawson turns to messages given to the enquiry between Sturgeon, Humza Yousaf and former chief advisor, Liz Lloyd. Sturgeon explains she got these messages from the Scottish government.

Dawson asks: "You didn't have those on your own device because you had deleted them, hadn't you?"

"I didn't retain them. In line with the procedure I've already talked about," she replies.

Asked whether she was creating a distinction between deletion and retention, Sturgeon says:

"I think deletion - forgive me - sounds as if it was a sort of... not bothering to check whether information was being retained. I was very thorough not just in the pandemic but all my work in government to ensure things were appropriately recorded."

Jamie Dawson says: "But did you delete them?"

To this Sturgeon responds: "Yes."

Image source, Covid inquiry

Inquiry lawyer Jamie Dawson, asking questions, now specifically asks about messages between Nicola Sturgeon and her former deputy, John Swinney, who gave evidence to the inquiry yesterday.

She says she doesn't think she ever sent Swinney a WhatsApp - and if she did it was an "exception".

Occasional texts were sent between the pair, Sturgeon says, but only as a precursor to face to face meetings. "Can you come and see me?" "Do you have a moment today to chat?" are some of the examples she gives of the kinds of texts she shared with Swinney.

Sturgeon adds that the number of people's phone numbers that she has in her phone is limited.

Remember: Yesterday, Swinney told the inquiry that he had manually deleted texts between himself and Sturgeon from during Covid. He said this was in line with the Scottish government's message deletion policy and was how he had always acted in his 16-year ministerial career.

Image source, PA Media

The former first minister explains that it's not possible or desirable to record every single word that is uttered in government.

Ministers must be able to have an "open, thinking out loud discussion before getting to the point of a proposal, let alone a decision".

Sturgeon says the government was taking decisions and those decisions will all be discernible from the corporate public record and the public record.

Sturgeon says that decisions made during the pandemic were clearly communicated to the public.

These were decisions that "could not be kept secret", she says, because they included instructions to the public.

She asserts that they went to "great lengths" to communicate their decisions and their reasoning to build trust with the people with their compliance.

She admits that not every word of internal meetings was recorded, but that the salient points were "absolutely" communicated.

Sturgeon is being asked if the verbal conversations she had with colleagues were recorded.

She says that in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, decisions were taken at a “frenetic” pace.

She says she and her team were taking decisions at very short notice and the situation was changing several times a day.

“I would have conversations in the morning, and by the afternoon things would have changed,” she says.

Jamie Dawson KC recalls evidence given by Jeane Freeman, the then-Scottish health secretary, who said quite a lot of discussions with Sturgeon took place in person, in St Andrew's house.

Sturgeon says the majority of conversations she was having at the time with Freeman or other senior advisors such as the chief medical officer would be face to face in St Andrew's house.

She says: "I was in St Andrew's house from...very early in the morning to very late at night, almost every day for an extended period of time, as were these other individuals.

"For a period, seven days a week."

Sturgeon confirms that members of her private office would record the "salient points" of these meetings.

Sturgeon is now explaining some of the places she found messages between herself and other officials in the lead up the inquiry, all of which she says she has submitted to the necessary people.

She says she was "racking her brain" to remember all the ways she had spoken to anyone about Covid during the pandemic. One of those ended up being her private messages on Twitter, now X, known as direct messages (DMs), she says.

Messages that she found on the app were with people including Prof Jason Leitch, the Scottish government's clinical advisor.

But she says a key part of this evidence is one of the last messages she sent to Leitch, in which she says she told him that if he wanted to talk about official matters, "come and see me properly, this is not the place to do it". Sturgeon says that clearly shows her attitude on the matter.

Image source, Covid inquiry

Jamie Dawson KC says Sturgeon knew her WhatsApps had been destroyed when she was asked about informal messaging at a briefing in August 2021.

Nevertheless, Dawson highlights that she assured Ciaran Jenkins of Channel 4 News in August 2021 that she would turn over all relevant communications, including WhatsApps, to the hearings.

Sturgeon says she apologises if the answer to Jenkins was "not as clear" as it should have been.

The former first minister gives the inquiry a personal assurance that she is certain that the inquiry has "anything and everything germane to my decision-making during the process and the time period of the pandemic".

"It's essential to the scrutiny of decisions that I will carry the impact of these decisions with me forever and I want to make sure anyone who comes after me in politics has the benefit of the learning, the things that my government did right, the things that my government did that were not right.

"These decisions were of a magnitude beyond what I had ever experienced."

Sturgeon says she thinks about the impact of her decisions every day and she wants both inquiries to scrutinise them so lessons can be learned.

Jamie Dawson KC asks Sturgeon about her informal communications, saying that Sturgeon already knew by the time an inquiry was announced that her WhatsApp and private messages had been destroyed.

Sturgeon replies that she also knew, that "anything of substance" from that material would have been properly recorded, and would have been communicated by her during her daily press briefings.

She says it is important for the inquiry to have all the information about the government and the decisions they were making.

In August 2021, civil servants sent a “do not destroy” email to Scottish government officials, with the subject “Covid-19 inquiry record retention”, says Jamie Dawson KC.

It explained the importance of keeping material in case it was required for a future inquiry.

"Do you recall receiving that?" Dawson asks.

“As far as I am aware I did not receive that,” says Sturgeon.

Still on the point of using WhatsApp for work purposes, Sturgeon adds that in her time as first minister, she would not have expected any ministers or officials to have been conducting "substantive government discussions and certainly not taking government decisions" through WhatsApp or other means of informal messaging.

Still on the topic of WhatsApp and other text messages, Nicola Sturgeon says she believes the issue with using informal platforms like these at work is that "phraseology" can be different to more formal means.

"Informal communication, I think, lends itself to very short, sharp exchanges," she explains, adding this is different to, say, making a speech.

She adds that she was aware, as first minister, how important it was for public messaging to be communicated properly.

The focus shifts to WhatsApp messages between the then-Health Secretary Humza Yousaf and Professor Jason Leitch, who was clinical adviser to the Scottish government.

Jamie Dawson KC suggests these show that "informal messaging, in particular WhatsApp, was a frequent part of the way in which the Scottish government conducted its business in Covid".

Sturgeon says she had no knowledge or sight of these exchanges before the inquiry and she accepts WhatsApp has become too common a way of communicating.

She tells the inquiry what she has seen does not suggest government decisions were made using WhatsApp.

Image source, Covid Inquiry

The Scottish government used to share the state of the pandemic with the public "almost every day", says Sturgeon, to communicate the difficult choices they faced and what they expected from the public.

"There was a very open form of communication," she says, and adds that she has not seen any indication that people were unaware of certain decisions taken by the government.

"[That] might be a matter for the Scottish public to judge," counters inquiry lawyer Jamie Dawson.

"Of course, of course," says Sturgeon.

Critics unsure of Scottish government's message deletion policypublished at 10:22 Greenwich Mean Time 31 January

10:22 GMT 31 January

David Wallace Lockhart
Political correspondent, at the Covid inquiry

We’re straight into one of the biggest issues looming over Nicola Sturgeon’s evidence session - the use of WhatsApp.

Her explanation of how she used the app is similar to a number of other officials and her deputy at the time, John Swinney.

She says she rarely used the app, and that anything of significance in informal messages was saved separately to the Scottish government record.

But critics point out that in this system it appears that ministers get to decide what’s relevant (and is retained) and what’s not.

Sturgeon says she "very rarely" used informal messaging systems - referring to platforms such as WhatsApp - to discuss "issues of substance".

"There was a high degree of formality around decision making within the Scottish government" she says.

The former first minister goes on to explain that with "salient points of substance", she would ask herself if that was reflected or recorded in the Scottish government's record - either through her logging it on the record herself or by making its way there formally by being published.

She says: "I would check whether there was anything that required to be recorded on the Scottish government system and I am absolutely, firmly of the view that there is nothing...in any informal messaging that I would have been party to that could not have been seen and understood through the formal systems and indeed through the public communications I was engaging in on a daily basis."

Jamie Dawson has swiftly moved on from talking about "openness, transparency, accountability" to a common theme in these hearings - WhatsApp and text messages.

Nicola Sturgeon says she only used platforms like WhatsApp for "informal communications" - and not for official decision-making processes.

She adds that she wasn't a member of certain WhatsApp groups that other ministers would've been communicating in.

"I did not do government business through informal messages, in relation to Covid or any other matter," she tells the inquiry.