My pal Kate Garraway has been heroic in this ‘living hell’ with Derek – my eyes sting with tears reading all our texts
When Kate Garraway and Derek Draper told me in 2005 that they were getting married, I joked: ‘Bloody hell – if I’d known the bar was that low, I’d have had a crack myself!’
It says everything about them that they both laughed hysterically, then put that quote on their wedding invitations.
I knew them separately long before they got together; Derek was a smart, funny, hard-partying, sometimes ruthless Labour Party adviser with whom I regularly locked horns during my editorship of the Daily Mirror, and Kate was an equally smart, delightfully warm TV presenter without a ruthless bone in her body who became a good friend after interviewing me on ITV’s old GMTV breakfast show.
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To say I thought they were incompatible is the understatement of the century, hence my joke.
But it soon transpired they were the perfect embodiment of the phrase ‘opposites attract.’
In fact, I can honestly say I’ve never met a couple better suited, or who enjoyed a stronger and happier marriage.
That’s what makes the tragedy which befell them even more heart-breaking.
I’ll never forget the call I took from Good Morning Britain’s editor on March 31 2020 in which he told me that Derek had been rushed to hospital after catching covid in the first wave of the deadly pandemic, and was in critical condition.
There was no vaccine then, nor any therapeutic drugs to deal with the novel coronavirus, and thousands of people in Britain were dying every day.
So, his prognosis was dire.
I phoned Kate, then my GMB colleague, and we had a long, heart-rending conversation, one of many we’ve had since.
She said the hospital had run out of ventilators and was so swamped with new seriously ill covid patients arriving that nobody in ICU could even come to the phone to tell her if Derek was alive or dead.
‘The story of her life’
I gave her the only advice I could think of that might help a fellow journalist in such an awful situation.
As she told Ben Shephard in her first TV interview ten weeks later:
“Very early on, I spoke to Piers, and he just said, ‘Right, come on Garraway, you’re a journalist. This is the story of your life. Your focus now is Derek. You’ve got to fight for Derek. You’ve got to get all the information you can.’ And that really helped because I thought, ‘I’ve got a job,’ because we were in free-fall. My job is to fight for Derek and keep life safe for Darcey and Billy (their kids).
“That forced me into breaking news mode. When something awful happens and you’re on-air, you’ve got to not think about the emotion of it, you’ve got to think about doing your job. I rode that for weeks and weeks and weeks, thinking, ‘What do I need to do? What doctor do I need to speak to? What else can we be doing?'”
Kate continued riding that mindset right to the very end, investigating every possible new treatment anywhere in the world, jumping on planes when she needed to, until Derek finally lost his long, extraordinarily courageous fight.
I was devastated
I woke up in Los Angeles on Friday morning to the message from her that I’d dreaded for nearly four years.
‘Dearest Piers,’ it began, ‘Derek has passed away…’
I was devastated, but not entirely shocked.
Kate had told me things were looking very bleak when we texted each other on Christmas Day.
As The Sun revealed yesterday, Derek suffered a devastating heart attack in Mexico where he’d been secretly undergoing more treatment at a specialist clinic to which Kate had taken him before.
She flew back with him on a medical-evacuation plane to London, but he never recovered and died in hospital.
It’s hard to overstate what he and Kate went through over the past few years –the constant 24/7 physical and mental torment inflicted on them both was far worse than people realise and would have destroyed most couples.
Reading back through our hundreds of texts and reliving the traumatic roller-coaster ride of hope and despair they went on in real time, made my eyes sting with tears.
But instead of breaking them, it made them even closer.
At one stage, Kate admitted to me: ‘It’s a living hell to be honest. I keep saying I can’t bear it but then somehow do. It’s managing feeling, and holding in the same moment your greatest hope, greatest fear, and total uncertainty about what way it’s going to go – all the time. I don’t think I’ve ever loved him more or felt more at risk of losing him. But at least I still have hope which lots of people have had taken away from them.’
That was typical Kate, always thinking of others before herself, devoid of any self-pity. In interviews, she would deliberately downplay how bad things were because she didn’t want people to think she was complaining when so many were suffering too.
I would try to rally her spirits by reminding her of Winston Churchill’s ‘Never give in!’ speech or Nelson Mandela’s words, ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done’, or sending her hopeful news stories about some new treatment or of long-term covid patients suddenly recovering.
But the reality of her and Derek’s life was unrelentingly grim.
As she once put it: ‘Trouble is, the tunnel keeps getting longer.’
Despite this, Kate kept up with all her media work commitments, often despite barely any sleep, and somehow managed to both care for her stricken husband, and solo-parent their children, as the family navigated the draining daily grind of their situation.
I’d watch her on TV, sometimes just hours after we had an agonising conversation about a new setback, and marvel at how cheery and positive she sounded.
Never once did I see her lose her famous Garraway sense of humour, usually accompanied by a mischievous cackle.
‘If Derek comes through this, it will be the second most miraculous achievement of his life,’ I said during one particularly emotional call.
‘What was the first?’ she replied.
‘Persuading you to marry him!’
We both laughed loudly.
‘I’m going to tell him you said that when I speak to him later!’ she said, and she did. And apparently, he smiled.
Carer brought to tears
What kept Kate going were the occasional periods of lucidity from an otherwise uncommunicative Derek that understandably gave her real hope, like when she couldn’t remember their Sky TV pin number, and he suddenly blurted it (accurately) out.
I experienced a brief one myself when I interviewed her for my final Life Stories show, which she now hosts.
When I rang her the night before, and asked how Derek was doing, she said:
‘He’s next to me now, why don’t you ask him yourself?’
I was stunned.
‘Darling, it’s Piers,’ I heard Kate say.
‘Derek!’ I cried. ‘It’s so good to talk to you!’
There was a pause and then I heard a familiar voice say clearly and firmly: ‘Hello!’
‘HELLO!’ I stammered back. ‘It’s great to hear your voice again. Keep battling Derek – we’re all so proud of you!’
Another pause, then, ‘Thank you!’
Kate came back on the line.
‘Wow!’ I said.
‘Yes, wow!’ she replied.
‘I wasn’t expecting that.’
‘Nor was I!’
She told me the next day that one of his carers burst into tears afterwards because he hadn’t interacted like that for so long.
And Kate herself shed tears in our interview that day when she recounted another three words that Derek had finally said to her again: ‘I love you.’
Of course, as millions of TV viewers saw in several incredibly moving documentaries Kate made about their ordeal, he had other times when he would very briefly converse, and even go out.
The last time I saw Derek was at my annual Christmas pub party in Kensington just before the pandemic erupted and days after Kate got back from competing on I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!
(‘She is such an amazing woman,’ Derek texted me halfway through, ‘I so, SO want her to be No 1 for once.’)
They were blissfully happy that night, kissing and cuddling for the paparazzi outside and telling me with great excitement how they were going to renew their wedding vows the following summer.
Then, just three months later, their whole world collapsed.
Ironically, I was due to see Derek again three weeks ago, back in the same pub for the same annual Christmas party.
Kate was going to bring him early, before a big crowd arrived, including many of our mutual friends, which she said he would find overwhelming.
But the heart attack ended those plans.
And now I’ll very sadly never see him again.
Nor, far more sadly, will Kate, an astonishingly inspiring woman who worked so heroically hard and so utterly selflessly, with such astounding commitment, dedication, and loyalty, to try to get her man through his nightmare.
Their marriage was even more magnificently powerful in the face of such tremendous adversity than it was in the good times, fuelled by a mutual love so profoundly deep that few experience anything like it.
Little did I know when I made my quip about their engagement that the bar was in fact set so incredibly high.
RIP Derek.
