When Kate Garraway and Derek Draper told me they were getting married in 2005, I joked: ‘Damn – if I’d known the bar was that low, I’d have snapped myself!’
The fact that they both laughed hysterically and then put that quote on their wedding invitations says it all.
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Kate Garraway and Derek Draper at my Christmas party in December 2019 Credit: Rex
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With Kate and fellow GMB host Susanna Reid in 2021. Credit: Getty
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My friends Derek and Kate were complete opposites, but their marriage just worked
I knew them separately long before they came together; Derek was a smart, funny, party-worthy, sometimes ruthless Labor Party adviser with whom I regularly fell out when I was editor 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 an interview with me on the old ITV breakfast show on GMTV.
Watch Piers Morgan uncensored weekdays on Sky 522, Virgin Media 606, Freeview 237, Freesat 217 or Fox Nation in the US and enjoy his explosive interviews here
To say I thought they were incompatible is the understatement of the century, hence my joke.
But they soon proved to be the perfect embodiment of the phrase ‘opposites attract’.
In fact, I can honestly say that I have never met a couple who was a better match or who enjoyed a stronger and happier marriage.
That is why the tragedy that befell them is even more shocking.
I will never forget the call from the editor of Good Morning Britain on 31 March 2020 telling me that Derek had been rushed to hospital after contracting covid in the first wave of the deadly pandemic and was in a critical condition.
At that time, there were no vaccines or any therapeutic drugs to fight the new coronavirus, and thousands of people in Britain were dying every day.
So his forecasts were bad.
I called Kate, then my GMB colleague, and we had a long, heartbreaking conversation, one of many we’ve had since.
She said the hospital ran out of ventilators and was so overwhelmed with new seriously ill covid patients arriving that no one in the ICU could even get to the phone to tell her if Derek was dead or alive.
“The Story of Her Life”
I gave her the only advice I could think of that could help a fellow journalist in such a dire situation.
As she told Ben Shephard in her first TV interview ten weeks later:
“I spoke to Piers very early on and he just said, ‘Okay, come on Garraway, you’re a journalist. This is the story of your life. Now the focus is on 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 have a job,” because we were in freefall. My job is to fight for Derek and protect the life of Darcey and Billy (their children).
“It put me in breaking news mode. When something terrible happens and you’re on the air, you don’t have to think about the emotions, you have to think about doing your job. I did that for weeks and weeks and weeks, thinking: ‘What should I do? What doctor should I talk to? What else can we do?'”
Kate continued to drive that mindset to the very end, researching every possible new treatment anywhere in the world, hopping on planes when necessary, until Derek finally lost his long, extremely brave fight.
I was devastated
I woke up in Los Angeles on Friday morning to a message from her that I had been dreading for almost four years.
‘Dearest Piers,’ it began, ‘Derek has passed away…’
I was devastated, but not completely shocked.
Kate told me things looked very dark when we texted each other on Christmas Day.
As The Sun revealed yesterday, Derek suffered a devastating heart attack in Mexico where he secretly underwent further treatment at a specialist clinic where Kate had previously taken him.
She returned 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 have been through over the past few years – the constant physical and mental torture inflicted on them both 24 hours a day was much worse than people realize and would destroy most couples.
Reading our hundreds of texts and reliving the traumatic rollercoaster ride of hope and despair they took in real time brought tears to my eyes.
But instead of breaking them, it brought them even closer.
At one point, Kate admitted to me: ‘Honestly, this is hell. I keep saying I can’t take it, but then somehow I do. It’s managing the feeling and holding onto the same moment of your greatest hope, greatest fear, and utter uncertainty about how 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 the hope that so many people have taken away from them.’
It 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.
I would try to lift her spirits by reminding her of Winston Churchill’s ‘Never give in!’ a speech or Nelson Mandela’s words, ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done’, or sending her hopeful news about some new treatment or the sudden recovery of long-term covid patients.
But the reality of her and Derek’s life was relentlessly bleak.
As she once said: ‘The problem is that the tunnel is getting longer and longer.’
Despite this, Kate kept up with all her media work commitments, often despite barely sleeping, and somehow managed to care for her stricken husband and single mother of their children, while the family navigated the grueling day-to-day of their situation.
I would watch her on TV, sometimes only a few hours after we had a painful conversation about another failure, and marvel at how happy and positive she sounded.
I never saw her lose her famous Garraway sense of humor, usually accompanied by a mischievous giggle.
“If Derek survives this, it will be the second most amazing achievement of his life,” I said during one particularly emotional call.
‘What came first?’ she replied.
‘He’s persuading you to marry him!’
We both laughed out loud.
‘I’ll tell him you said that when I talk to him later!’ she said and did. And he obviously smiled.
Caregiver brought to tears
What kept Kate going were occasional periods of lucidity from the otherwise uncommunicative Derek that understandably gave her real hope, like when she couldn’t remember their Sky PIN and he suddenly (correctly) blurted it out.
I experienced a short one myself when I interviewed her for my last show Life Stories, which she now hosts.
When I called her the night before and asked how Derek was, 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 was crying. ‘It’s so nice talking to you!’
There was a pause, and then I heard a familiar voice say clearly and decisively: ‘Hello!’
‘HELLO!’ I stammered back. ‘It’s great to hear your voice again. Keep fighting Derek – we’re all so proud of you!’
Another pause, then, ‘Thank you!’
Kate got back on the line.
‘Woof!’ I said.
‘Yeah, wow!’ she replied.
‘I didn’t expect that.’
‘Neither did I!’
The next day she told me that one of his carers had burst into tears afterwards because he hadn’t communicated for so long.
Kate herself shed tears in our interview that day when she recounted three more words that Derek said to her again at the end: ‘I love you.’
Of course, as millions of TV viewers saw in several incredibly moving documentaries that Kate made about their ordeal, he had other moments when he would talk very briefly and even go out.
The last time I saw Derek was at my annual Christmas party in a pub in Kensington just before the outbreak of the pandemic and a few days after Kate returned from competing on I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!
(‘She’s such an amazing woman,’ Derek texted me halfway through, ‘I SO SO want her to be #1 one day.’)
They were blissfully happy that evening, kissing and cuddling for the paparazzi outside and excitedly telling me that they would renew their wedding vows next summer.
And then, just three months later, their whole world came crashing down.
Ironically, I was due to see Derek again three weeks ago, in the same pub at the same annual Christmas party.
Kate intended to bring him early, before the large crowd arrived, including many of our mutual friends, which she said he would find overwhelming.
But a heart attack interrupted those plans.
And now, unfortunately, I will never see him again.
Nor, more sadly, will Kate, an incredibly inspiring woman who has worked so heroically hard and utterly selflessly, with such admirable dedication, commitment and loyalty, attempt to see her man through his nightmare.
Their marriage was even more magnificently powerful in the face of such tremendous adversity than it had been in good times, fueled by a mutual love so deep that few experience anything like it.
When I joked about their engagement, I had no idea that the bar was actually set so incredibly high.
RIP Derek.
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Kate and Derek were a special couple Credit: Rex
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Kate’s documentaries showed her extreme devotion to DerekCredit: ITV
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Kate and Derek were a very special couple Credit: Enterprise
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