Boris Johnson has told the UK Covid inquiry he "got on very well" with Scotland's Nicola Sturgeon despite claims of "tension" between the leaders.
Under questioning from Claire Mitchell KC, representing the Scottish Covid Bereaved group, the former PM insisted that he "had no ill will whatsoever to the First Minister of Scotland".
"We got on very well and had a friendly relationship," he added.
Previously the inquiry had been told by Lord Edward Lister, a political strategist and Downing Street chief of staff from 2019 until 2021, that there was "a great deal of mistrust and frustration" towards the Scottish Government.
Ms Mitchell said that Lord Lister had described there being "quite a lot of tension" between Mr Johnson and Ms Sturgeon, and that the pair "didn't like each other very much".
"Politically there was a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing between the SNP and myself as PM of the UK," said Mr Johnson.
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The former PM said he put Michael Gove - then the cabinet secretary - in charge of handling relations with the devolved administrations during the pandemic to "take the steam out of things...rather than having people who were not necessarily my number one fans feeling the need to chip paint off the government".
Mr Johnson said different public health messaging between the four UK nations "wasn't helpful" during the pandemic.
He said: "I was worried that there was a continual dissonance of messaging and I was worried that that would do two things: it would confuse people and in the end it would undermine people's confidence in the message."
Ms Mitchell noted that it was the UK Government alone which switched its messaging from 'stay at home' to 'stay alert' in England in May 2020, at a time when Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were not yet downgrading their advice.
"Why was consistency of messaging not an issue when the UK Government decided to change its message?," she asked.
Mr Johnson said he did not "want to make too much heavy weather" of the issue but insisted that diverging public health messages were "sometimes a problem".
Ms Mitchell pointed to research submitted to the inquiry outlining numerous occasions where data, guidance, and other pandemic-related policies were outlined in ministerial statements or press conferences without distinguishing when they applied to the UK as a whole or England only.
Covid guidance "suffered from a particular lack of clarity" in this regard, said Ms Mitchell.
Mr Johnson said it was "remarkable how quickly people got the messaging", adding that "whatever the SNP may think, the virus thinks we are all one country".
In future, he said, it "should be entirely the job of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to announce the different rules that apply in different places across the UK".
Adding that while he "respects" the democratic right of devolved administrations to set their own public health agendas "in the particular context of a brutal, pitiless pandemic there had to be some way of helping the public with greater unity of messaging".
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