Derek Draper, New Labour maverick turned psychotherapist and husband of Kate Garraway – obituary

Derek Draper, who has died aged 56 after suffering prolonged complications from Covid-19, was a buccaneering back-room boy-turned lobbyist during the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

In later life he married the popular Good Morning Britain presenter Kate Garraway and trained as a psychotherapist, putting behind him “the unbalanced, stressed-out, empty existence” that he had led in Westminster. But the controversy that had dogged his name in his political days faded away after Draper became seriously ill with Covid in March 2020.

Admitted to an intensive care unit and put into an induced coma, he remained in hospital for more than a year. The virus inflicted long-lasting damage to his organs and after his release from hospital he needed round-the-clock care.

His plight, and that of his wife and two teenage children, evoked considerable public sympathy, particularly after the airing in 2021 of an ITV documentary, Finding Derek, in which with unflinching candour Kate Garraway allowed television cameras to record the life-changing effects of severe Covid on Draper, as well as on some other patients, and her fears about the future.

“Derek is probably the cleverest person I’ve ever met,” she says in  Finding Derek. “Is he going to be alive but no longer the same person? Am I grieving for the man I married? Or fighting to hold on to him when I should be trying to adjust?”

Later she concludes that “it may be a rather beautiful thing”, as the couple “might have to fall in love all over again”.

A follow-up was released a year later, Kate Garraway: Caring for Derek, charting how family life had changed since Draper returned home to continue his recovery, in a house specially adapted with ramps and widened doorways. She also published a bestselling book, The Power of Hope.

Derek Draper originally came to the attention of Westminster-watchers as an aide to Peter Mandelson in the early 1990s and, from 1996, as a director of the lobbying company GPC Market Access. Colourful and brash, he drove a vintage Mercedes and was an enthusiastic, champagne-swilling frequenter of private members’ clubs. He also had a reputation for never understating his own role in British politics.

“My message was quite simple, really,” he recalled in 2005. “I’m rich and a bit of a w----r; who cares; you can still be that and be Labour.”

For an undercover journalist equipped with a tape recorder he was a sitting duck. In August 1998 a reporter for The Observer claiming to represent clients from the American energy industry wanting to seek exemptions from pollution rules, approached Draper asking for help.

In remarkable exchanges, Draper boasted that he had passed inside information about Gordon Brown’s spending plans to an American bank; that he had wangled a seat for a leading businessman on a government task force, and that a £60,000-a-year weekly column he wrote in the Daily Express was vetted by Mandelson, then Minister without Portfolio.

He went on to disparage various ministers before offering to go to Liz Lloyd, “one of my best friends”, who had been put in charge of the environment in the Downing Street policy unit by Tony Blair.

“There are 17 people who count in this government,” Draper said, “and to say I am intimate with all of them is the understatement of the century.” Digging himself into the mire ever more deeply, he explained his motivation: “I just want to stuff my bank account at £250 an hour”.

What became known as the Lobbygate scandal cost Draper his Express column, his editorship of the New Labour magazine Progress, and his lobbying job.

The episode was also deeply embarrassing for Blair, seen as evidence that his creation, New Labour, was not a party but an incestuous clique.

The scandal caused Draper to suffer a full-blown nervous breakdown. A few years later he trained as a psychotherapist in California, returning to London to establish a practice – so successfully that in 2007 he was joint winner of the Mind journalist of the year award for a feature on depression.

In 2005, by which time he had taken to referring to the 1990s as his “idiot years”, he married the GMTV presenter Kate Garraway in a wedding featured in OK! magazine.

Draper’s demons, however, had not been completely slain, as became clear in 2009 when he was caught up in another scandal.

In the summer of 2008, with Gordon Brown in No 10 and Labour fortunes at a low ebb, Draper was approached by Ray (now Lord) Collins, the party’s new general secretary, and agreed to help prepare for the forthcoming general election.

Many expressed reservations, pointing out that in the 2005 election Draper had urged people to vote tactically against Labour. But Lord (Roy) Hattersley, an old friend, was one who felt confident that Draper was now “a changed man. He’s got older, is more measured… He will be an asset to the party.”

In a presentation at Labour HQ Draper proposed setting up a website that could target the Tories and counter Right-wing bloggers such as Guido Fawkes. In February 2009 he launched LabourList, a website where “people can find out about the party”, declaring: “My return to politics seems to be going well so far.”

On April 11, however, The Daily Telegraph reported that Gordon Brown’s “Director of Strategy”, Damian McBride, had sent a series of emails from the Downing Street Press office to Draper discussing plans to post false rumours about the private lives of senior members of the Conservative Party on a blog to be called Red Rag.

These included challenging David Cameron, the Conservative leader, to come clean about an “embarrassing illness” and “putting the fear of God” into George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, by spreading false rumours that he had taken drugs and had sex with a prostitute. “These are absolutely totally brilliant,” Draper replied.

The two men initially tried to brazen it out, dismissing the exchange as “ill-judged gossip between friends which was never meant to see the light of day”. Draper claimed that he had only responded to McBride’s email to gain favour from Downing Street for LabourList.

But it soon became apparent that their plans were much more fully developed when it emerged that Red Rag had been set up in November 2008 – the same day as Draper had made his presentation at Labour HQ.

McBride resigned; 10 Downing Street issued an apology for the “juvenile and inappropriate” emails; Gordon Brown sent personal letters to those who had been traduced, expressing his regret, and eventually bowed to pressure to make a rare public apology. In May, Draper yielded to pressure to resign from LabourList.

Around the time the scandal broke, Draper published a self-help book entitled Life Support: A Survival Guide for the Modern Soul. “In our very worst moments, when we knowingly lie to steal an advantage, we may even secretly glory in our mendacity,” he wrote. “More usually, though, we try to bury the memory of the deed, or distract ourselves from the guilt, because it’s too uncomfortable to live with the lie.”

Derek William Draper was born on August 15 1967 at Chorley in Lancashire. His mother was a cleaner and his father a British Leyland shop steward. From Southlands High School, Chorley, and Runshaw College, Leyland, he went to Manchester University to read Economics.

There he threw himself into student politics, waging war on the Trotskyites who controlled the student union, and, after graduation, worked his way on to the executive.

One day, however, infuriated by an article in a student newspaper that was critical of him, he broke into the newspaper’s office and poured paint over the offending publication. As a result he was kicked off the union executive, though he later claimed to have been jettisoned “for sleeping with the Lesbian Liberation Officer”.

He began his political career in 1990 when he moved to Newcastle to work as constituency assistant to Nick Brown (later Labour’s Chief Whip). Through Brown he met Mandelson, moving to London after Mandelson entered Parliament in 1992 as MP for Hartlepool.

As Draper moved into the world of lobbyists, his reputation as a chancer grew. In 1997 he published Blair’s 100 Days, a gushing account of the early months of his premiership. Many of those quoted in the book protested that the quotes attributed to them were made up, and when a BBC political correspondent approached Draper at a party and whispered a rumour going around that he had not actually written it, Draper replied: “Write it? I haven’t even read it.”

Following the Lobbygate debacle, the former editor of The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, gave Draper a political show to present on Talk Radio, but it was short-lived. On a weekend break in Amsterdam, Draper put in a call to the station’s James Whale Show from a Jacuzzi in a brothel. He was promptly sacked again. In 2001 he left Britain to train as a psychotherapist at the Wright Institute of California, a graduate school in Berkeley.

Back in England, he set up in private practice as a psychotherapist, describing himself as “experienced at treating emotional and psychological issues including: self-esteem, personal development, depression, anxiety, addictions, self-harm, personality problems and family and relationship concerns”. In 2009 he took a second MA in the Foundations of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from the Tavistock Centre.

A member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, he wrote occasional columns for The Mail on Sunday on psychotherapy issues and also for specialist magazines.

In May 2019 Draper announced he had resigned his Labour Party membership. The following year he contracted Covid-19, and in December 2023 Kate Garraway announced that he had suffered a heart attack and returned to hospital.

Interviewed by Celia Walden in the Telegraph in 2021, when Kate Garraway was caring for Draper at home, she said: “ ‘I feel like I understand so much more about Derek, like I…’ Love him more? ‘Oh God. I didn’t think it was possible, but I really do… And now I would give everything I own to hear him being really loud and shouty and full of opinions, ruffling feathers in the way that he used to.’ ”

Derek Draper is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.

Derek Draper, born August 15 1967, died January 5 2024

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