I’ll miss Derek Draper, the old rascal

The death of Derek Draper, the former Labour party apparatchik, got acres of press coverage, with tributes pouring in from the great and the good, including Tony Blair. But reading the obituaries, I couldn’t help feel that they didn’t do justice to the man I first met in the early 1990s, and for a time counted among my closest friends. They neither captured the full extent of his skulduggery nor how entertaining he could be when relating the latest gossip from Blair’s inner circle.

His friend Decca Aitkenhead’s piece in the Sunday Times came closest, but she left out one of my favourite anecdotes, perhaps because it involves her. As I recall, Derek’s wife, the TV presenter Kate Garraway, had sold a package to OK! magazine about their wedding in 2005 and, as part of the deal, agreed to write an account of her ‘special day’. It was due while they were on their honeymoon and, since selling the story had been Derek’s idea, she asked him to ghost-write it for her.