Whatever the reason, there is something seriously amiss in the office of SNP Culture Secretary Angus Robertson when his most senior officials fail to tell him about repeated requests to attend a board meeting of a crisis-hit agency for which he has ultimate responsibility.
Having told a Holyrood committee he had not been invited to Historic Environment Scotland’s recent board meetings, an email leaked to a newspaper revealed it wasn’t true, and after my colleague Stephen Kerr raised the matter in the Scottish Parliament on Tuesday, it turned out he had been asked no less than three times.
Mr Robertson’s excuse for the misleading answer was he hadn’t been told about the approaches, and if so it’s quite extraordinary that experienced civil servants decided not even to mention that the beleaguered former chair Dr Hugh Hall had been in touch, because of ongoing investigations into allegations of malpractice. “We’ve received these approaches, Cabinet Secretary, but we would strongly advise against attending,” was all it would have taken but instead, said Mr Robertson, they kept schtum.
This is a high-profile public organisation with a £70 million budget in meltdown because of internal strife and Mr Robertson shows a remarkable lack of curiosity about what might be happening on his watch, or the drive to find out.
Maybe another email leak might reveal more because, as Stephen Kerr said, Mr Robertson threw the officials under a bus to save his own skin. It might take more than a helpless shrug of the shoulders to brush this off.
