The First Minister of Scotland has been under increasing pressure this week to reveal what she knew and when about allegations of sexual misconduct from her close confidant Alex Salmond, after contradictory timelines and claims of “forgetting” about a key meeting.

This morning, Sturgeon was keen to push the “it’s hardly a big revelation” line when reading out the content of some select texts she had been accused of withholding from the Salmond inquiry. Yet when explaining the context surrounding the texts, she went on to say “I think the reason perhaps he is angry at me is that I didn’t cover it up, I didn’t collude with him to make these allegations go away.” Directly suggesting he wanted to collude with her to make these allegations go away.

This potentially reveals more than Sturgeon intended it to, and leads to one obvious question: Why did she not ring the alarm bell before this morning that, as she suggests, Salmond wanted to “collude” with her to “make these allegations go away”?