TONY Blair and Gordon Brown have sent messages of support to Kate Garraway’s sick husband Derek Draper.
Both former Prime Ministers reached out to the Good Morning Britain presenters husband who is still in a coma 10 weeks after contracting the virus.
Now Lord Mandelson has revealed the two Labour heavyweights have both sent their support to the former political lobbyist.
Appearing on Emma Barnett’s show on BBC Radio 5 live, the Labour peer labelled his illness a “tragedy”.
He said: “The whole experience, the whole dreadful, tragic experience of what’s happened to him has actually brought an enormous lot of people, who knew him in the 90s and beyond, who knew him in New Labour and the government.
“He’s been a hugely unifying figure, ironically, through this terrible, terrible tragedy. Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have sent him recorded messages, as we done the rest of us.
“We’re now giving him music, we’re giving him photographs to stimulate a response, we’ve all come together, and we hope, and pray, that he will come through it.”
The 52-year-old is a PR and former political adviser from Chorley, Lancashire.
He was a political aide to former Labour cabinet minister Lord Mandelson, and later retrained as a psychotherapist and spent three years in California obtaining his degree.
In the late 90s, he worked as the Political Editor of the Modern Review, was briefly a columnist for the Daily Express and presented on Talk Radio UK.
He was hospitalised at the end of March after becoming worryingly breathless and, because of strict hospital hygiene rules, his family haven’t seen him in person since.
He tested positive for Covid-19, but even though he is now free of the virus, it has wreaked considerable damage on his major organs and he remains seriously ill.
Kate exclusively told HOAR of the devastating impact of Derek’s illness on her and their two children: Darcey, 14, and Billy, 10.
Shortly before he was put into an induced coma to try to help his body fight the virus, Derek spoke to Kate on the phone and said: “You have saved my life. I don’t just mean now, I mean everything. Being married to you, and the children.”
“We have to try to live with the uncertainty that we won’t necessarily know that he’s OK.”
Three weeks ago, the hospital withdrew the drugs that had placed Derek in an induced coma but, despite occasionally opening his eyes, he hasn’t yet regained consciousness.
This morning Susanna Reid and Piers Mogran fought back tears as they revealed they “hope for a miracle” for Derek.
An emotional Kate earlier recalled her final words to Derek before doctors put him in an induced coma.
She said: “He couldn’t really speak to me because of the mask, but he was begging me, ‘I feel like I’m suffocating, please let them put me in a coma’, because there was a debate about that.
“But I said ‘no we’ve got to wait’ because if his lungs can handle it that’s better.
“Then on the Sunday morning they rang me up and said we’re going to be putting him in a coma, and he just said to me ‘I love you, I am sorry I have to leave you’, and I said ‘it’s only for three or four days and you’re going to fine this is good, this is good. This is what you wanted, to rest.’”
