Alex Salmond appears in front of the Scottish Affairs Committee #Devolution #WhatsApp

The Scotsman

Transcript

00:00 Mr Salmon, your evidence today and when I read your evidence in 2010, it struck me that

00:06 although you maybe didn't always agree with UK ministers, there was a kind of willingness

00:11 to try and make it work. And you've said a number of things today, over things that mattered

00:15 or cooperate when you can and various other things. So there was obviously a willingness,

00:19 although you might disagree, to have always made devolution work. Do you think your successors

00:24 followed the same path?

00:27 I'm not an expert. Because I wasn't in the room, right? I don't know where the... I deliberately

00:34 cited Bernard Jenkins Committee, because that's a cross-party committee, unanimous report.

00:41 I think the institutions, once the referendum and the post-referendum period, there wasn't

00:48 the same incentive that Christy and I were discussing, perhaps. These particular issues

00:53 of Brexit and COVID caused great tensions. There's probably an issue as well that the

01:02 generation of devolved parliamentarians, government ministers who are familiar with this place

01:11 was largely past. I think that familiarity helped, knowing how this place, not just in

01:17 parliamentary terms, but in decision-making terms in Whitehall, works as a great advantage,

01:22 an enormous advantage. So for all these reasons, I think clearly... But what are the rights

01:29 and wrongs? I think the evidence points to the Brexit period in particular and the relationships

01:36 of successive prime ministers in that period as being one of great difficulty.

01:41 I'll push you a bit though, because you have commented on a number of things today that

01:44 you weren't in the room for, and you know your successors very well, although perhaps

01:48 not in quite as good a relationship now. So do you think they have the same approach to

01:53 devolution as you had about making it work, or do you think actually they're more interested

01:57 in proving that it doesn't work?

01:59 No, I mean, I cannot conceive that any First Minister of Scotland who was interested in

02:07 Scottish independence wouldn't want, A, to do their absolute best in running the devolved

02:12 Parliament and administration, and secondly, to agree as many things as possible in terms

02:18 of the intra-government relations. I don't think there's any premium on not agreeing

02:23 positive things, because I think success breeds success, and that was my attitude. I've known

02:31 Humza Yousaf for many, many years, and he's a positive person. I'm sure that's the attitude

02:37 he wants to strike up, but I do hope when David Cameron and Humza Yousaf have their

02:44 first meeting, they can sit down and talk about how they direct letters to each other.

02:52 David Cameron would never, ever have written me a letter like that, or written it to some

02:57 proxy. I mean, it's just the case. I kind of believe that Humza Yousaf is responsible

03:03 for that deterioration of relationships, since he's only been in office for a year, and David

03:08 Cameron had only been in office for a week.

03:10 I'm keen to come back on that question in a minute. I just wanted to keep you on this

03:14 issue of relationships, because you specifically cited in 2010 and again today, around particular

03:21 big moments of national crisis, government could work very well. I think you said then

03:25 that when minds were concentrated on a major issue, there was cooperation. Obviously, the

03:30 biggest major issue we've had in recent years has been the COVID situation. There was evidence

03:36 given to the COVID inquiry, although not as much as there should have been, that senior

03:41 advisors in the Sturgeon government saw it as an opportunity for a rammy on the constitution.

03:46 If you had been First Minister during the COVID pandemic, would you have carried out

03:50 government in the way that the Sturgeon government did?

03:53 I certainly wouldn't have had that person as anywhere near being a senior advisor. I

03:59 mean, it struck me, the person you're talking about is Liz Lloyd. It struck me as one of

04:03 the most revealing thing I saw in that was that somehow, amid all the missing WhatsApp

04:08 messages, one message which managed to be somehow miraculously retained was the one

04:15 that referred to Boris Johnson as an "expletive-deletive clown." Now, listen, your constituents, my

04:24 old constituents, many people may agree with that, but I cannot believe the COVID relatives

04:32 watching that inquiry wanted to hear that, or for that matter, the Scottish Secretary,

04:39 addressing things in the way he did and giving his evidence. I mean, the last thing COVID

04:43 relatives want to hear is what politicians think about each other. What they want to

04:47 hear about is what they actually did in terms of addressing the thing. So as far as that

04:52 particular case is concerned, that particular person wouldn't have been a thousand miles

04:56 from being a senior advisor.

04:58 And on that exact point about messages being retained, I appreciate you were in government

05:04 in a period maybe where WhatsApp wasn't quite such a key part of our day-to-day life, but

05:08 electronic messaging was in different forms. Did you retain any of your messages from that

05:14 period, and are you surprised about how few have been retained by the current government?

05:19 Well, I was interested to hear that some people claimed those practices back to 2007 to delete

05:25 messages. That was the first I'd heard of it. And I actually checked with Kerry McCaskill

05:29 and Alec Neil, the two ministers at the time, whether they'd ever heard of that policy or

05:36 not, they hadn't heard of it either. I conducted everything through my private office, not

05:43 because I wasn't, you know, well actually probably because I wasn't that electronic

05:49 at the time. I think I first had WhatsApp in 2017 or something like that, so it was

05:55 a bit after I left office. But I conducted everything through my private office, or in

06:01 personal contact, phone calls or whatever. I didn't, actually, I mean, with your indulgence,

06:08 Chair, I used to get very annoyed at the informality of emails. And we had a whole succession

06:17 at one point, not particularly important issues, but of FOIs which showed civil servants emailing

06:23 each other about the football results. They're harmless enough stuff. So I said to John Elvidge,

06:29 I said, "What would be the chances of banning emails in the Scottish government?" And John

06:35 said that perhaps that would be a bit adventurous to ban them totally, but perhaps we could

06:41 have a pilot in one of the departments. So John organised a pilot somewhere in, I think,

06:47 the historic monuments section with three people in it. And I used to, I mean, we weren't

06:52 being entirely serious, but I was just trying to get across the fact that I didn't think

06:55 it was a great idea for civil servants and official correspondents to be talking about,

06:59 hopefully, hearts beating hymns. But if it was hymns beating hearts...

07:02 Just one more time, if I may, this is all very interesting and even amusing, but we're

07:08 trying to stick to 25 years of devolution and Mr Salmond's accounts thereof.

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