Russell Cheyne/Reuters
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.