When Peter Mandelson was thinking of hiring Derek Draper as a research assistant in 1992, he called a well-placed Labour colleague for a reference. He was advised that his young candidate was “rough, tough and ruthless”. The description was meant to be discouraging, but Draper nevertheless got the job and thus secured his foot on a ladder that would give him a privileged view of the political operation that became Tony Blair’s New Labour government.
For just over a decade, Draper, who has died aged 56 after a long period suffering the effects of Covid, was one of the most familiar figures behind the scenes at the interface between journalism and politics in the bars at Westminster, in the dining rooms of Pall Mall and among the cushioned comforts of the plusher Soho clubs. But his apparently enviable career as a key adviser and then, from 1996, as a political lobbyist became instead, as a result of hubris, what more closely resembled a cautionary tale.
Draper was at the time a larger-than-life character, entertaining and unpredictable but with an irrepressible sense of his own importance. He earned a fortune, drove a vintage Mercedes and had a well-documented and colourful private life. But a boastful reference to his political influence, which appeared in a 1998 Observer newspaper exposé suggesting that certain lobbyists close to Labour were offering access and valuable market intelligence about government policy to their clients, immediately cost Draper his job as director of a lobbying company and his part-time employment as a newspaper columnist on the Daily Express – as well as his public reputation.
“There are 17 people who count in this government and to say that I am intimate with all of them is the understatement of the century,” Draper had asserted of his personal standing in relation to the Blair administration in the newspaperObserver report. Although he was not responsible for any illegal activity in what was dubbed the “Lobbygate” scandal, his rodomontade had profound personal repercussions, leading to a breakdown, a sustained period of serious depression and seven years in therapy.
He emerged from this period of intense introspection having secured a master’s degree in clinical psychology at a graduate institute in Berkeley, California, then retrained as a psychotherapist and set up as a private practitioner on his return to London. He also studied part-time for a second master’s from the Tavistock Centre and Essex University (2009).
In 2005 Draper had married the television presenter Kate Garraway, the co-host of ITV’s Good Morning Britain, and though he was thus still occasionally in the media spotlight, it was mostly in the reflected glare of his wife’s public fame. Their wedding was featured across 22 pages of OK! magazine and he credited her for having “saved his life” by marrying him.
He was born into a politically active family in a traditional Labour party mould in Chorley, Lancashire. His Scottish mother, Chrina (nee Walkingshaw), worked as a cleaner, and his father, Ken, was a shop steward at British Leyland. By the time he was a pupil at Southlands high school, Derek knew that he wanted to work in politics. He took his A-levels at Runshaw college, Leyland, before studying economics at the University of Manchester. His maternal grandfather was a miner and his enthusiasm for his chosen career was enhanced by the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
He spent some lively years in university politics and was a traditional Labour supporter in the students’ union, famed, somewhat improbably, for having a poster of Roy Hattersley on the wall of his college room. He worked for Hattersley in the 1988 deputy leadership election and, having established his credentials in the party, was hired by Nick Brown MP as his constituency secretary in Newcastle upon Tyne East.
Draper was anxious, however, to work in Westminster and, having impressed Mandelson during the latter’s first campaign as a parliamentary candidate in Hartlepool in the 1992 general election, was hired as his researcher in the House of Commons. Over the following four years he established himself as a figure in the emerging New Labour era, although a cavalier manner meant that he was often regarded with suspicion.
He parted from Mandelson to become a director of the lobbying firm GPC Market Access, the post he lost after the Lobbygate fiasco. During this period Draper helped to found the Progress organisation to support Blair in 1996 and compiled a book on his initial period in office, Blair’s 100 Days, which was launched with great ceremony in a fashionable restaurant in September 1997. Asked if he had written the book, Draper retorted: “Write it? I haven’t even read it.”
After leaving his full-time career in politics, Draper returned briefly as a part-time unpaid adviser to the then general secretary of the Labour party, Ray Collins, in 2008. He helped establish the LabourList website to promote the party’s interests, but resigned in 2009 after it was reported that he had enthusiastically backed a plan to publish scurrilous fabrications about Conservative politicians and their families.
He continued to work in journalism and as a consultant, and published books including Life Support: A Survival Guide for the Modern Soul, in 2009. He resigned from the Labour party, after 35 years’ membership, in 2019.
In March 2020 Draper was hospitalised with Covid. He spent 98 days in a medically induced coma before going into intensive care, where he reportedly became the longest surviving patient with coronavirus after 184 days. He remained in hospital, his body having undergone significant damage, and after returning home in April 2021, required round-the-clock care before being readmitted in July 2022, and again in November 2023.
Two documentaries, Finding Derek (2021) and Caring for Derek (2022) were broadcast by ITV.
He is survived by Garraway, their two children, Darcey and William, his parents, and his sisters, Susan and Dianne.
• Derek William Draper, political adviser, lobbyist and psychotherapist, born 15 August 1967; died 5 January 2024
