How the SNP’ ‘captured’ Scotland’s civil service — and why it matters

The failure to minute meetings, the “industrial” deletion of most — but not all (Liz Lloyd, Sturgeon’s chief of staff, retained some) — WhatsApp messages and an apparent culture of secrecy around their scheming, was exposed. For critics of successive SNP administrations, who have railed against the “capture” of the Scottish civil service for more than a decade, it was a moment of grim satisfaction.

Some figures torpedoed by the inquiry had become famous during the pandemic. The smiling, chatty manner of Jason Leitch, the national clinical director, had catapulted him on to radio and news programmes and even the occasional comedy show.

A different character emerged from WhatsApp records: a senior civil servant who could advise Humza Yousaf how to bend the rules on the wearing of masks — “have a drink in your hands … then you’re exempt” — while dismissing a political opponent, Neil Findlay, the former Labour MSP, as an “arsehole”.

Ken Thomson, director-general of strategy and external affairs for Sturgeon’s administration, had, apparently, been on a journey since his job as Donald Dewar’s principal private secretary in the Labour-led Scottish executive. This, it emerged, was the adviser who scribbled “indy is back” on meeting notes with a senior minister in 2021.

It was Thomson too who joked with his colleagues that his middle names were “plausible deniability” and Thomson who warned “seriously” that everything in their WhatsApp group was “discoverable under FOI” [freedom of information] rules. “Clear chat” he advised. For Leitch, deleting WhatsApp messages was “a pre-bed ritual”.

A senior figure signed “Scott”, identified as Scott Wightman, the Scottish government’s director of external affairs, sent a message from the deputy first minister John Swinney’s email account warning that travel restrictions affecting Spain might have “political” consequences because the government in Madrid “will never approve EU membership for an independent Scotland”.

The Scottish Conservatives have written to Scotland’s most senior civil servant, the permanent secretary John-Paul Marks, urging him to open an investigation into the “alarming politicisation” of his staff under the SNP government.

Leitch made a name for himself and appeared on television shows

JANE BARLOW/PA

On Thursday, Thomson left his latest job as chairman of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland for “personal reasons” but it remains remarkable to many Holyrood insiders that neither he nor any of his senior colleagues anticipated the possibility of public humiliation.

“We did have conversations along the lines of, ‘Everyone needs to realise this will end in an inquiry’,” said one former top official, who resigned after the pandemic had passed its peak. “And here we are, with it all laid out at the public inquiry. It’s certainly shining a light on how things operated.”

Insiders insist that most civil servants do not allow “the cause” — as true believers refer to independence — to influence their day-to-day work, but were obliged to follow the lead of “spads, policy officials and comms [communications] people” who, the insider said, set the daily agenda.

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Holyrood “isn’t filled with crazies”, said the former official, who asked not to be identified, “it just needs strong leadership and to get back to being the civil service”.

Ken Thomson, the former director-general of strategy and external affairs, left his new job at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland after a month

Many recall the feverish atmosphere around government as the independence referendum approached, but after the Nationalists lost the vote, there was hope at Holyrood that the business of government might return to the relative calm of the early years of the new Scottish parliament.

“There was — to coin a phrase — an awful lot of healing to be done. It was really quite fractured,” said the former civil servant. “But there were still loads of people who had come out politically and they stayed in that space. Everyone should have crawled back under their civil service rocks and got on with writing policy.”

Two “massive shocks”, the accusations made against Alex Salmond, Sturgeon’s predecessor as first minister, and the pandemic, meant there would be no return to normality.

A year-long civil service-led investigation into allegations against Salmond was found by a court in 2019 to have been unlawful, unfair and “tainted by apparent bias”. A year later, the former SNP leader was found not guilty of allegations, including some made by civil servants, of sexual assaults. Salmond’s brief press call outside the High Court on an almost empty Royal Mile heralded the start of lockdown.

For Holyrood public servants, these were extraordinarily demanding times. People were simply exhausted, said the former insider, who added: “The civil service got itself into a ‘just tell us what you want and we will do it’ position, which suited the political administration really well. As time went on, there was less and less energy to push back. It was basically just ‘roll over’. The old ‘speak truth to power’ thing, well, that just went out the window.”

In these circumstances, the gold command could be a law unto themselves. The Covid inquiry heard that cabinet figures such as Kate Forbes, then finance minister, had no idea about the group’s existence but, for high-ranking officials, a place on the top team was reward in itself.

“There is that thing of feeling ‘I’m in the inner circle’,” said the ex-civil servant. “Few people got anywhere near the first minister — Forbes didn’t even get near her. For some of those who did, it was a real thrill because it was an endorsement of them.”

John-Paul Marks, the country’s most senior civil servant, has been asked by the Scottish Conservatives to start an investigation into the “alarming politicisation” of his staff under the SNP

ANDREW COWAN/GETTY IMAGES

Insiders say Marks, appointed permanent secretary in 2022, has shown more inclination to push back against ministerial opinion. There is, however, a collective shaking of heads when the names of his predecessors, Peter Housden and Leslie Evans, come up.

Housden, who served under Salmond, was said to have “gone native” by opposition politicians, allowing the civil service to be an instrument of the SNP as it drew up detailed plans for the formation of an independent Scottish state.

The posturing of Evans, his successor, became the stuff of legend. When she posted a selfie of herself taking the knee, apparently outside her comfortable home, her “clown tweet” provoked ridicule of her “virtue signalling”.

Evans’s rush to endorse hotly contested gender recognition reform outraged opponents of the policy. In a 2019 tweet, she posed in front of a poster telling those who identify as the gender of their birth, “cisgender”, to appreciate the personal “entitlements” they receive.

“Understand your privilege,” the poster read. “Recognise the ways that being cisgender allows you to access washrooms, healthcare or transcripts with ease. Think about the entitlements you take for granted which others must fight.”

The permanent secretary’s behaviour was unprofessional, according to a former senior civil servant. “She had one job, which was to run an impartial government machine that served ministers well and served the public interest,” Lucy Hunter Blackman, who is now an analyst, said. “Instead she used her role to promote a set of contentious ideas.

“It was a misuse of the leadership role to promote personal views in a really contentious area. I don’t think she knew what she was doing, that is the mind-blowing thing. It was an unprofessional use of the job, but she seemed utterly unaware of what she was doing.”

Evans’s behaviour was in line with research suggesting that the willingness of the most senior civil servants to comply with Scottish ministers is at odds with the behaviour of their more assertive counterparts at Westminster.

The former finance secretary, Kate Forbes, was unaware of the gold command structure led by Sturgeon during the pandemic

JANE BARLOW/PA

In Scotland, there has been just one “ministerial direction” since the SNP came to power, a written order issued when ministers wish to override a permanent secretary’s objections to a proposed item of spending.

By contrast, a study by the Institute for Government think tank found there had been 52 ministerial directions to Whitehall departments since 2010, highlighting that UK civil servants are more than prepared to challenge ministers’ policy choices.

Yet over the same period the SNP-run government has embarked on a succession of “progressive” policies — from the short-lived offensive behaviour at football matches act to the still-to-be-enacted hate crime act — requiring legislation which, almost without fail, was inappropriate, poorly worded and error strewn.

Responsibility for these policy failings lies at the top and the feeling that most civil servants have been unfairly tarnished by the inquiry’s revelations is shared by the First Division Association (FDA) union.

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The professional body, representing middle and top-ranking civil servants, said it deplored the characterisation of its members “as political operatives seeking to cover up for the government at Holyrood” and said such attacks set a dangerous precedent.

“A civil servants’ duty of impartiality means they cannot speak up to defend themselves publicly, so it is the responsibility of ministers to defend them,” said Allan Sampson, the FDA’s national officer for Scotland.

There were, however, legitimate questions to answer “regarding the Scottish government’s internal policies on preserving an official record; of decision-making, and it is right that a full review of these policies takes place”, he said.

Sampson added: “Where things have clearly gone wrong, they should be fully investigated, but to suggest that large swathes of Scottish civil servants were working in contravention of the civil service code just isn’t based in reality and is having a corrosive effect on public trust in our institutions.”

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James Mitchell, professor of public policy at Edinburgh University, accepted the need for “root and branch” reforms of minute-taking and retaining evidence and drew a distinction between career civil servants and some of those appointed to special positions from outside.

Most public officials are “overwhelmingly professional and neutral”, he said, and while civil servants “may appear partial simply by serving the government of the day, what we have seen is an ability to move seamlessly from serving one party to another after an election”.

More thorough screening was required, Mitchell said, for posts such as chief medical officer or national clinical director, where appointees are likely to come from outside the professional civil service, with a possible return to the parliamentary committee appointment hearings adopted in the early days of devolution.

Perhaps the best hope for a reset revealed by the inquiry was evidence that independent thought still flourished within the civil service.

Notes taken by Derek Grieve, who led the Scottish government’s initial response, showed he was alive to the dangers looming from Covid yet, as late as March 5, 2020, few of his fellow mandarins in Edinburgh believed “this is going to be serious”.

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After attending a Cobra meeting in London on February 26 that year, Grieve, then interim head of health protection, wrote it was “clear” that UK government departments were “fully engaged and mobilised in a way that the SG [Scottish government] simply isn’t”.

The following day, he described how a colleague had tried to increase the sense of urgency at a meeting of Scottish government directors “to encourage them” but noted that “there was still no real engagement”.

“They then spent 20 minutes talking about internal SG comms. Completely amazed,” Grieve said.

Less than a month later the country went into lockdown and the Scottish government began to spin its short-lived myth of competence.