Jason Leitch’s appearance before the UK Covid inquiry was the most painful morning anyone has spent with a dentist without losing their wisdom teeth.
KC Jamie Dawson winced more than once as the national clinical director strove to explain away his deletion of WhatsApp messages and a back-and-forth in which he advised Humza Yousaf on how to get around face mask rules.
Dawson is a marvellous ham, vaguely dapper and with one of those posho Edinburgh accents that come with their own salmon chinos and I.J. Mellis loyalty card.
Mask tips: Mr Yousaf asked Professor Leitch
Every time he summoned a fresh slab of damning evidence onto the screen, he prefaced it by noting aridly: ‘This is an exchange from a WhatsApp message which you did not provide.’
It was a masterclass in how an advocate can damn a witness by stating the most mundane of facts.
Leitch attempted to walk back his now-famous declaration, captured in a group chat, that ‘WhatsApp deletion is a pre-bed ritual’, telling the inquiry that the ‘slightly flippant’ remark was ‘an exaggeration’.
He still deleted all his messages, you understand, but just not daily, insisting that he complied with the government’s policy and made sure any relevant information was recorded.
It didn’t take long to see why Leitch might have been keen to hit the delete button, nightly or otherwise.
Dawson had acquired a conversation between the national clinical director and Humza Yousaf, who asked whether he had to wear a mask while standing at a public event.
‘Officially yes,’ Leitch had responded.
‘But literally no one does.’
He then advised Yousaf to ‘have a drink in your hands at all times’ – ‘then you’re exempt’.
It was put to Leitch that he had given Yousaf a ‘workaround’, but he maintained that his comments were nothing more than compliance advice.
He danced so exquisitely on the head of this particular pin that even Craig Revel Horwood would have given him a ten.
More to the point, at the time in question, Yousaf was the health secretary. ‘If the health secretary didn’t understand the rules, what chance did anyone else have?’ Dawson wondered.
Mate, have you seen his later work?
When it comes to verbal daggers, inquiry chair Baroness Hallett appears to have graduated from the same knife-throwing academy as Mr Dawson.
In a suitably jaded tone for a former Court of Appeal judge, she remarked: ‘Some of the messages I’ve read reflect a rather enthusiastic adoption of the policy of deletion of messages.’
Leitch denied enthusiasm on his part and agreed that it would be wrong if anyone had erased communications to get around freedom of information laws.
He was a cool customer even under sometimes terse questioning, which some will interpret as a clear conscience and others as glibness.
Some of the messages which did survive were valuable for their candour, not least an exchange with Kate Forbes, who despite being a senior minister in the Scottish Government had to ask Leitch about the rota for Covid briefings.
‘It’s not very well organised. Basically Liz L and FM decide,’ he explained, an apparent reference to Sturgeon’s chief of staff Liz Lloyd. This same conversation also captured Forbes’s desert-dry wit.
After Leitch went into detail about his being assigned to weekend appearances, Forbes curtly replied: ‘I’d prefer Monday.’
Savage.
Admitting he sometime ‘overspoke’, Leitch put it down to the number of media platforms he appeared on and his efforts to get across clinical messages to a general audience.
He brought up his regular appearances on Off the Ball, which required Dawson to explain the football-centric radio programme to Baroness Hallett.
Much of her legal career was dedicated to miscarriages of justice, so you’d think she’d be familiar with the broadcasting careers of Stuart Cosgrove and Tam Cowan.
Barely had he vacated his chair than Labour’s Jackie Baillie was on her feet at Holyrood demanding Leitch be sacked.
He should see the intervention as ominous.
You can either be a senior civil servant or you can be the story.
You can’t be both.