Derek Draper

Derek William Draper (15 August 1967 – 3 January 2024) was an English political lobbyist and psychotherapist.

Derek William Draper was born in Chorley on 15 August 1967.

He was educated at Southlands High School until 1984.

He later attended Runshaw College in Leyland and the University of Manchester.

While at the university, Draper provided hospitality for Ken Livingstone, who had missed his train after a Labour Club meeting.

Livingstone was reportedly astonished to find a large poster of Labour's deputy leader Roy Hattersley displayed in Draper's student room.

At around this time, he first met Charlotte Raven and later dated her.

Draper began his political career in 1990, when he became the constituency secretary for Nick Brown.

During the late 1990s, Draper worked as the Political Editor of the Modern Review, was briefly a columnist for the Daily Express, and a presenter on Talk Radio UK.

Seen as a close ally of Mandelson, and as an insider in the New Labour project, he was viewed by political journalists as well-connected, influential, colourful and gregarious, and was nicknamed "Dolly" in Westminster circles.

In 1992, he left this job and went to work as a researcher for the MP for Hartlepool, Peter Mandelson.

In 1996, he became a director of a lobbying firm called GPC Market Access, and was employed by them until early 1999.

While working at GPC Market Access, he set up the New Labour organisation Progress with Liam Byrne.

As a political advisor, he was involved in two political scandals: "Lobbygate" in 1998, and another in 2009 while he was editor of the LabourList website.

He authored two books, Blair's 100 Days and Life Support.

In 1998, while still working as a director at GPC Market Access, Draper was caught on tape, with Jonathan Mendelsohn, boasting to Greg Palast (an undercover reporter from The Observer posing as a businessman) about how they could sell access to government ministers and create tax breaks for their clients.

When the press got hold of the story, they dubbed it "Lobbygate".

On the recording, Draper said that "there are 17 people who count in this government ... [to] say I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century."

Palast also wrote that Draper said, regarding his motivation: "I just want to stuff my bank account at 250 pounds an hour."

According to Palast, "Draper was nothing more than a messenger boy, a factotum, a purveyor, a self-loving, over-scented clerk."

Although he denied the allegations and accused The Observer of attempting to entrap him, he was widely ridiculed in the aftermath.

Palast later wrote that the subsequent media coverage had over emphaised the role of lobbyists in the story at the expense of New Labour's "obsessional pursuit of the affections of the captains of industry and media ... twisting law and ethics to win the approval of this corporate elite".

Following his involvement in the "Lobbygate" scandal, Draper was sacked from his job at the Daily Express and generally shunned by Labour insiders.

His friend Peter Mandelson said that Draper "has a fine intelligence, but sometimes I am afraid he misuses that intelligence. He gets above himself. But now he has been cut down to size and I think probably he will learn a very hard lesson from what has happened."

After leaving politics, Draper retrained as a psychotherapist, obtaining an MA in clinical psychology after what he described as "three years in Berkeley, California".

While in Berkeley, he worked as "the development director of a community counselling centre"; later, he claimed to have entered "private practice in Marylebone, London".

He subsequently clarified that he had studied at the Wright Institute of California, a graduate school in the town of Berkeley, founded by Nevitt Sanford.

(He was also reported in a Guardian gossip column as studying at the Tavistock Clinic.) Draper responded to the controversy surrounding his claimed psychotherapy degree, by denying the allegations completely and saying that this was "a brazen attempt to smear me by Guido Fawkes and David Hencke".

It further clarified Draper's qualifications: "Derek Draper has the following qualifications: An M.A. in Psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley (2004) and a second M.A. in the Foundations of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from the Tavistock Centre, London / Essex University (2009). The former was the result of three years’ full-time study, the latter of two years of part-time study. As part of his first M.A. he undertook an extensive clinical training, undertaking over 1500 hours of supervised clinical work with different client populations and therapeutic modalities."

During the 2005 general election campaign, Draper urged people to vote tactically against Labour, saying, "I don't want my vote to be used as vindication for Tony Blair, I'd like him to wake up after the election and feel like a hunted man".

During 2008, Draper made a return to British politics.

He was described on the BBC television current affairs programme Newsnight, on 12 September 2008, as a Labour Campaign Advisor.

He stated in 2009 that he was considering taking legal action against them.

Draper was a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).

He wrote an occasional column for the Mail on Sunday newspaper on psychotherapy issues, and also wrote monthly columns in the magazines Psychologies and Therapy Today.

He was also the author of a chapter in The Future of the NHS.

In response to a formal complaint the BACP announced on 24 November 2009 that it had "considered complaints received against Mr Draper concerning his involvement in an email scandal earlier this year which brought his profession as a psychotherapist into the public domain and therefore the name and reputation of BACP. An independent Appeal Panel was convened to consider the matter and decided, in the light of all the evidence and the commitments of Mr Draper, that his membership of this Association would not be withdrawn."

On 7 June 2009, emails that were highly critical of Gordon Brown that Peter Mandelson sent Draper in January 2008 were leaked to the News of the World which claimed that Brown was "insecure" and a "self-conscious person, physically and emotionally".

Draper made headlines in March 2020 when he contracted COVID-19 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in England, and became seriously ill with an exceptionally serious case of long COVID; he was hospitalised for over a year and continued to require round-the-clock care upon release.

He returned to hospital with extreme complications in December 2023, during which time he sustained a cardiac arrest; he died in January 2024.