Kate Garraway has revealed her husband Derek Draper was trapped in one of Heathrow Airport’s new disabled passport scanners for “an hour”.
Former political adviser Mr Draper, 56, contracted Covid-19 in 2020 and suffered serious complications, spending months in hospital and now, years later, still requiring full-time care.
Draper, who shares two children with Good Morning Britain presenter Garraway, 56, now uses a wheelchair and has very little strength in his arms, and the complications have also affected his cognition and speech.
While travelling back from the United States of America, where Draper had been for treatment, he used Heathrow’s disabled passport scanners.
The new installation was created specifically to allow wheelchair users to go through the self-scanners, an “achievement” that the airport was celebrating, as previously they would not have been wide enough to allow them in.
However, all did not go to plan as Draper was locked in and trapped for an hour.
Discussing the incident on Wednesday’s episode of Good Morning Britain, Garraway explained: “Heathrow was celebrating, they put in a new wheelchair-width… passport scanner.
“Before then you couldn’t get a wheelchair through. They put one in at vast expense, but when it came to do it with Derek – disability has a wide range, he hasn’t got the cognition you’ve got or the strength you’ve got in your upper body – we realised we couldn’t get him into the country.
“He went forward, the door locked, but the disabled person has to free it and you’re not allowed, because of the border, to do it yourself. So he was stuck in no man’s land, literally between two borders, for an hour or so.
“So even when conscious effort has been made to make things work, and I wonder if it’s because there aren’t enough disabled people talking about it.”
