Calderwoodgate

Calton is so mad he could spit nails. After nearly two weeks of looking longingly over the Forth to the Fife coast when all he could do was a once-a-day flight round Arthur's Seat he finds out that the SNP Government's Chief Medical Officer has been nipping across to Earlsferry for the weekend. Twice. During lockdown. She has now, quite rightly, been spoken to by the police and has offered her resignation. Astonishingly, the First Minister has refused to accept it in a colossal error of judgement which is, as Calton writes, turning the episode into a question about Sturgeon's decision rather than the original offence.

Sturgeon is usually a canny political operator who is perfectly willing to throw someone under a bus if they get in the way and so it is a measure of how rattled she has become with the Covid-19 pandemic that she has made such a poor decision in this case. She should have sacked Calderwood immediately or at least accepted her resignation with alacrity. Surely there are other suitably qualified people in Scotland just as able to give her advice? Such as Professor Hugh Pennington?

Presumably the First Minister hoped that today's press conference (described as "excruciating" on Radio 4 news) would put the whole thing to bed. She was wrong. A quick scan down the associated twitter hashtags indicates that far more people think #Calderwoodshouldgo than the minority who see this as a media conspiracy to bring down Sturgeon. More worryingly for the SNP, a number of people are now saying that they will henceforth take their guidance from Westminster, not Holyrood, when it comes to Covid-19. Calton has a lot of sympathy with that view. In a crisis like this, are the devolved powers a help or a hindrance? In Scotland it looks very much like the latter now. Sturgeon's response to the Calderwood incident may well prove to be her Watergate.