Nicola Sturgeon has played the EICC many times.

Just a few months ago, she packed out the main auditorium upstairs during the Edinburgh fringe.

But those sunny days of joshing with interviewers about her autobiography and adoring crowds were far behind her as she gave evidence to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.

The former first minister arrived at the conference centre just before 8am in the cold light of January to be met by cameras and a solitary protestor instead of any fans.

From the livestream of the inquiry, with its no-nonsense close-cropped angles, you might imagine everyone is crammed into a cubbyhole. 

But the Moorfoot Room is a sweeping arc with space for 200 at a push.

There were around half that many present for Ms Sturgeon’s all-day testimony - a large group of bereaved families, a handful of reporters, and banks and banks of lawyers.

Ms Sturgeon sat at a lonely desk on a stage alongside Lady Hallett. 

The chair’s entry required the room to rise to its feet - she was a judge - and generated a frisson of excitement. This, it was clear, would be no mere political joust for the witness.

Ms Sturgeon swearing to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” confirmed it.

She struggled to stick to her oath.

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Knowing she would be quizzed about missing messages, she argued the Scottish cabinet minutes alone provided a full history of government decision-making during the pandemic.

As for the thinking behind it, that was displayed in her daily Covid briefings, which were “almost an open conversation with the public” about the choices she faced.

Besides, WhatsApps and the like were open to misinterpretation and hence unreliable.

It sounded vaguely plausible, but inquiry counsel Jamie Dawson KC wasn’t buying it. 

He reminded her she told Channel 4’s Ciaran Jenkins in August 2021 that she would “disclose emails, WhatsApps, private emails… whatever” to the Inquiry.

Yet when she said it, she had already deleted her messages from the pandemic. 

Just as she had habitually deleted all such messages since entering government in 2007.

Reluctant even to say the word delete, Mr Sturgeon floundered as she attempted to explain how she could promise to hand over something she knew didn’t exist.

She claimed she had been “trying to answer the substance of the question” and so the “literal terms of the answer” may not have been clear. It was risible.

The former FM also stretched credulity by insisting political advantage and the pursuit of independence were excluded from all her pandemic decision-making.

While no one doubts her dedication during Covid, the eerily politics-free Nicola Sturgeon she described was not the intensely political Nicola Sturgeon that Scotland knows so well. 

Confronted with a June 2020 cabinet minute that showed she and other ministers agreed to consider linking independence with the Covid response, she flannelled again, claiming it merely reflected a comment in the room. Lady Hallet corrected her - it was an agreement.

While no one doubts her dedication during Covid, the eerily politics-free Nicola Sturgeon she described was not the intensely political Nicola Sturgeon that Scotland knows so well. 

Inconvenient evidence about fears in her Government about a travel ban to Spain making it harder for an independent Scotland to join the EU didn’t help Ms Sturgeon’s case either.

But critics hoping for a knock-out were disappointed. 

Ms Sturgeon remains a highly effective and persuasive communicator. 

Her tearful account of the immense, unsought responsibility thrust on her by the outbreak was moving and credible, despite predictable online cynicism.

It was hard not to feel she was being held to impossible standards, standards most of us would miss on an average day, let alone in the maelstrom of a pandemic.

Set against the scale of the crisis, some points pursued by Mr Dawson seemed footling and marginal. 

Ms Sturgeon emerged from her seven hours of testimony with her reputation bruised rather than lost, fallible and slippery like most politicians, yet dogged and laudable as few are.