On the evening of Halloween in 2020, the United Kingdom’s then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson began a televised address informing the nation of frightening news that England would be put into lockdown for the second time amid an alarming second wave of COVID infections.
Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland at the time, was singularly unimpressed with what she was seeing, her WhatsApp messages revealed Thursday. In a message to a top aide, Sturgeon wrote simply: “He is a fucking clown.”
The message was one of several revealed Thursday at the U.K.’s inquiry into the British government’s response to the pandemic. “This is fucking excruciating- their comms are AWFUL,” Sturgeon wrote in another text to her chief of staff Liz Lloyd, who was giving evidence to the inquiry.
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“His utter incompetence in every sense is now offending me on behalf of politicians everywhere,” added. “They really are a shower,” the Scottish leader wrote in another message, seemingly using the British phrase “shower of shit” to refer to Johnson and his Conservative Party colleagues.
Asked if Sturgeon and Johnson’s relationship had “completely broken down” by the point the messages were sent, Lloyd answered: “I think ‘broken down’ to a degree overstates what was there to break.” She went on to say that Johnson’s lack of interest and preparedness during calls with Sturgeon about COVID was such that “engagement with him came to be seen as slightly pointless.”
The ongoing inquiry has previously turned up other potty-mouthed messages sent between those occupying the corridors of power during COVID in the U.K. Johnson’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings wrote in one August 2020 message to his boss that, at the time, there was a perception emerging that Johnson was “happy to have useless fuckpigs in charge” of the government. Cummings apologized during his appearance at the inquiry for his “appalling” language.
