Derek Draper will be remembered as a charming New Labour buccaneer

“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”.

That was Derek Draper, political lobbyist, delivering his sales patter in 1998 to a client who turned out to be an undercover reporter for The Observer. 

Looking back, prompted by Derek’s rottenly sad and untimely death last week after a debilitating four-year battle with Covid, his words then have an end-of-the-century feel. The quotation is now a notorious exhibit in the New Labour memory museum. That era is passed even as the Labour party now looks to be knocking at the door of another stint in power. 

Today’s Labour is very different in mood from New Labour, choosing to present a sober face to the world. It wouldn’t be where it is now were it not for boisterous people like Derek Draper, who have inspired the next generation with confidence. 

The thing about Derek’s boast was that it was true. What doors into the government which had been open to him were shut as a result of Lobbygate. Derek Draper lost his job as director of GPC Market Access and gave up his column at The Daily Express. He went into the Priory to be treated for depression. His long slow march away from active politics had begun – though there would be controversial relapses along the way. 

In 2005, the sometime dashing socialite married the non-political television presenter Kate Garraway; abidingly happy family life followed with their children Darcey and Billy. Derek retrained as a psychotherapist and set up in private practice. He was successful and well-regarded in this work before being taken into intensive care in the early months of the pandemic.  

The seventeen “intimate” contacts identified were furious because, unlike him, they were now in government as politicians and as civil servants. They felt that he had compromised them by his comments and the inference that he could influence them. Bruised friendships eventually recovered. They never lost their affection for him – as shown by the current expressions of grief. 

Sir Tony Blair set the tone. Derek was a “tough, sometimes ruthless political operative, a brilliant advisor and someone you always wanted on your side. But underneath that tough exterior, he was a loving, kind, generous, good-natured man you wanted as a friend.”

This month’s obituaries have debated whether Draper was really New Labour or Old Labour, Brownite or Blairite. Sir Lindsay Hoyle, now Mr Speaker, has adopted a fashionably revisionist line. He is the MP for Chorley in Lancashire where Draper grew up and knew of Derek’s trade union stop steward father and ex-coal miner grandfather. 

Sir Lynsey claims Derek’s “conversion to an active Labour supporter came after the miners’ strike. He’s never really been New Labour, always loyalist mainstream Labour.” His comments are revealing about Labour’s continuing psychotrauma but misleading about Derek Draper. Derek resigned his Labour membership after 35 years in 2019 when Jeremy Corbyn was leader. 

As one of Blair’s closest advisors points out, “Derek was absolutely New Labour. Wherever he came from he got the aspirational side which was so important”. 

In the 1990s, Derek had a flamboyant lifestyle, much of it conducted in the Groucho Club in Soho, complete with a vintage Mercedes and many girlfriends. Latterly, he may have called them the “idiot years” but at the time his behaviour was of a piece with the optimistic, hopeful “Cool Britannia” mood that New Labour conjured up with such success. 

Derek was one of a group of young, self-confident macho men from working class or relatively humble backgrounds including Alastair Campbell, Phil Woolas, Charlie Whelan, Ian Austin and Damian McBride, who were never class warriors and who subscribed to the view that nothing should be too good for the workers, including themselves. 

They each made vital supporting contributions in the boiler room during the rise of the movement. And in each case, their hubristic political careers ended with tarnished reputations or disillusionment. New Labour owes its success in equal measure to a cadre of young women headed by the late Margaret McDonagh. They have drawn less attention to themselves than their male counterparts and mostly continue to work quietly making a constructive contribution to society.

Roy Hattersley, Nick Brown, and, above all, Peter Mandelson, the politicians Derek worked for, were all centrist, reformist politicians, each of whom contributed to “the project”. Like Campbell and Whelan, Draper had the confidence to speak on behalf of his bosses without consulting them. In contrast to today’s formalised and pallid phalanx of special advisors, their intention was to increase their principals’ political engagement rather than to protect them from reality and argument. 

In his political heyday, Derek was good company, witty, pithy and ready to give back more than he got from antagonists. His high intelligence and comic talent shone through. He had an innate understanding of the broader context of the issues of the day as well as a dogged determination to bend the details to his will. 

From his turbulent time as a National Union of Students executive at Manchester University, Derek Draper was an alliance builder on his own terms. He helped set up the Blairite Progress organisation and Labour List, the party’s centrist information exchange. Away from politics, he was a member of the Groucho Club set which established the short-lived but influential cultural zeitgeist magazine The Modern Review.

In 1994, Draper was at Mandelson’s side when he made the switch to back Blair for the leadership over Gordon Brown. He subsequently worked helping to fix the National Executive Committee to New Labour’s will. More discretely he helped some inexperienced politicians perform their new ministerial roles.

At Kinnock and Blair’s sides outside the Festival Hall on 2 May as the newly elected Prime Minister declared “a new dawn has broken”, Draper chose not to go into politics himself but to pursue the commercial opportunities which the Labour victory opened up. He published an instant book that September, Blair’s 100 Days, remarking nonchalantly “Write it? I haven’t even read it.”

As he took his distance from Labour politics after Lobbygate, Derek joined those in the party who persuaded themselves that Gordon Brown was the answer to their problems – misguidedly as it turned out. He did not advocate a Labour vote in the 2005 election. In 2009, he was drawn into a plot by then Prime Minister Brown’s special advisor Damian McBride, to publish online damaging allegations about the private lives of Conservative politicians. The emails between them were subsequently exposed on Guido Fawkes. I also put them up in full on the Sky News website and was surprised, given his old no-holds-barred modus operandi, when Derek complained to me about the personal hurt this had caused him. 

The smear idea was a lapse for the now emotionally sensitive Derek who was forging a new life as a psychotherapist and with Kate. He was ambivalent about his past. The last conversation I had with him before his illness was at a book launch when he was upset that his old political friends had not thought to invite him to an after party. 

Last year, it seemed that there was some hope that Derek might be able to have some kind of a life after the vicious illness which had made his bodily organs attack themselves, including his brain. Derek and his family were guests of honour at a summer party given by the director of the V&A Museum, Tristram Hunt, the former Labour MP. Sharply suited and alert in a wheelchair, he followed all that was going on and was able to speak a few brief words to well-wishers. It was a similar story when he attended Peter Mandelson’s wedding in the Autumn. 

Derek was not to make it. He will be remembered for two reasons. For the charming New Labour buccaneer he was. And for the extraordinary love and devotion he received from Kate through all the years after disaster struck. A tireless helpmate and campaigner for her husband, she is also the family’s lone breadwinner. 

Derek put it well himself in a generous review he wrote of Alastair Campbell’s first novel: “Not everything is hopeless and dark, though. Despite its tragic elements, the book has at its heart a belief that good relationships can heal pain.” 

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