Nicola Sturgeon has dismissed the planned Conservative vote of no confidence in her as a “stunt” which she is assured of surviving.
The First Minister immediately sought to move the agenda on to covid and away from Holyrood politicking in her first interview with the BBC in which she dismissed a vote against her as “a stunt”.
Sturgeon said: “We’ll see tomorrow I’m confident that vote will express confidence in me. Remember that the Tories said they would have confidence vote in me before I uttered a single word of evidence before the parliamentary inquiry. They have decided on this issue a long time ago this is a political stunt being brought forward by the Tories tomorrow.”
The Conservatives have signalled that the First Minister is “not free and clear” and will press ahead with a vote of no confidence in Holyrood on Tuesday evening.
Sturgeon told the BBC: “I look forward, if that’s the right expression, to the committee report being published tomorrow and we will look at that in great detail.
“But I cannot escape the conclusion that there are some members of that committee – because their public utterances show this – that decided before a single word of evidence had been taken that I was guilty of something and nothing was going to remove them from that view.”
She added that the Hamilton report has “concluded I did not mislead Parliament and I didn’t breach the ministerial code in any respect”.
Sturgeon added that while confident of the Holyrood arithmetic, because of the support of the Greens for her SNP minority government, that she she had other voting figures in mind.
Sturgeon said: "The day after tomorrow this parliamentary term will come to a conclusion. It is now for voters to decide who they want to be First Minister after this election.”
“I’ll be putting myself forward as the candidate for First Minister because there’s a big job of work to be done to continue to lead this country through a pandemic.
"I believe I’m the right person to do that and I want to focus on these issues. I’ve just come off a call this afternoon with families who have been bereaved as a result of covid, that’s where my focus and attention needs to lie.”
