Were we right to put so much faith in our Covid leaders here in Scotland during the pandemic?
Early in the outbreak, famously, Nicola Sturgeon became suddenly, wildly popular. Her sober daily briefings showcased her command of detail at a time when chaotic Boris Johnson appeared only sporadically and looking as if he had just found his notes down the back of the sofa.
God-like approval ratings propelled Ms Sturgeon onto a sparsely populated higher plane – one where, if it had been a club, she would have been sharing the rarefied air with David Attenborough, Judi Dench and the Queen.
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What got her there? It was more than just her cautious temperament. Sturgeon had the trust of the people. We trusted her to put controlling the virus and keeping the NHS going before all other considerations. We trusted her to be open and honest.
On a basic level, we trusted her – and by extension the team around her – to live up to their own rhetoric, in contrast to that shower down south.
But were they open and honest? Were they walking the talk when the cameras were off? That gratitude so many of us felt for living in Scotland rather than England during this collective trauma: was that justified?
Perhaps not. People with nothing to hide don’t behave secretively, as a rule, but getting a chicken bone off a fox would have been easier than getting the Scottish Government to release its pandemic-era communications.
First there were the delays, then it........