By his own admission Derek Draper could be a “cocky know-it-all”. His self-confidence was, on occasions, his undoing. Yet even those who had some reason to be embarrassed by his behaviour recognised he had a rare ebullience. Two former prime ministers led the political tributes, with Tony Blair saying Draper was “someone you always wanted on your side”. “He was a tough, sometimes ruthless political operative … But underneath that tough exterior he was a loving, kind, generous and good natured man you wanted as a friend,” Blair said.
“He was an important part of the New Labour story, at the centre of things right at the beginning. But most important of all, he was a good colleague and great friend. And we will miss him deeply.” Gordon Brown said he would remember Draper “as brilliant, creative and multitalented”. Draper first came to public prominence in 1998 in the “Lobbygate scandal”. He had been caught boasting to an undercover Observer reporter in a way that suggested his clients could pay for access to Blair and his inner circle. “There are 17 people who count in this government, and to say I am intimate with all of them is the understatement of the century,” Draper was recorded as saying. He was working at the time for the lobbying firm GPC Market Access after a stint as a researcher for Peter Mandelson, one of the architects of New Labour. “It was fair enough that I got caught being a bigheaded boaster,” Draper told the Guardian later. He was suspended from the lobbying firm within a day, and sacked as a columnist for the Express and editor of the Labour magazine Progress. It marked the end of a hedonistic time that he described as “hanging around the Groucho Club and … doing drugs” or “chasing after some pretty new researcher”. Draper had a breakdown after the scandal and stepped back from public life. After a four-week stay at the Priory, he started having therapy. He then rebuilt his life as a psychotherapist after training in Berkeley, California.
He married the TV presenter Kate Garraway in 2005 in a wedding that featured in the celebrity magazine OK!. The couple had two children, Darcey and Billy. He told the Guardian in 2003: “There is not a single cell in my body that wants to go back into politics.” He returned to the political fold in 2008, however, to become an unpaid adviser to the Labour party. The son of a British Leyland shop steward, he also set up the LabourList website. He planned it as a left-leaning alternative to the Conservative Home website and other rightwing blogs. At the time Michael Gove, then a shadow minister, described Draper as “irrepressible”. He said: “Derek is like a character in a novel who plays a prominent role and then disappears for a couple of chapters only to re-emerge again … You always feel there is a whiff of danger because you don’t know what he is going to do next.” Within a year Draper was forced to resign as the founding editor of LabourList when he was caught up in a No 10 smear scandal. He was sent an email from Gordon Brown’s aide Damian McBride outlining a plot to spread malicious gossip about George Osborne, David Cameron and others. “Absolutely, totally brilliant,” Draper unwisely replied. In his resignation statement he admitted it had been a “stupid, hasty reply” and that he should have immediately dismissed the plot as wrong. He withdrew from public life for a second time, vowing to concentrate on his therapy practice and limiting his political involvement to delivering leaflets for his local Labour party. Just after his resignation he published a self-help book, Life Support: A Survival Guide for the Modern Soul. It was very different from his first book, Blair’s Hundred Days, which was dismissed as hagiography. Instead of celebrating Blair, this time Draper discussed his hostility towards him. He wrote: “I’m still musing over what he means to me, and why I felt quite so much antagonism towards him. It’s taking me a while to figure it out. Hey, I never said it was easy.”