Kate Garraway: Covid ripped out our family’s heart... I don’t know if we will ever get it back
THIS was the week when TV star Kate Garraway should have been renewing her wedding vows with husband Derek Draper to mark their 15th anniversary.
Instead, the TV presenter faces a ‘very strange’ day as her husband continues his fight in hospital against coronavirus. In a moving interview in today’s You magazine, Kate, 53, says: ‘We hope and believe he will come out of it but we just don’t know. The heart of the family has been ripped out and we don’t know if we will ever get it back.’
The Good Morning Britain star returned to work in July on the advice of doctors who said she needed to re-establish a routine.
She has been strong for their two children, Darcey, 14 – who was planning a ‘second wedding’ for her parents on Thursday – and Billy, 11, but admits to moments when she’s ‘consumed with fear’. She seeks comfort in the sort of light-hearted moments that Derek – a ‘massive believer in silliness’ – would enjoy, adding: ‘It’s trenches humour. You need it to get through. So with the children I’d try to do things in a different way. We’d go and bounce on the trampoline for exercise and they’d laugh at how bad I was.’
Draper, a former political lobbyist turned psychotherapist, fell ill at the start of lockdown and was rushed to hospital on the advice of Good Morning Britain doctor Hilary Jones. He is now out of an induced coma but remains in intensive care.
Describing how ‘everyone has been staggeringly supportive’, Kate reveals that she even received a note from
Boris Johnson, who was hospitalised with Covid in April.
‘Boris handwrote me a really lovely note and Carrie [his fiancee] has sent us messages via other people. So I have seen a very human side to them. Boris’s public face gets a lot of stick but the challenge is that politicians are in the dark like us.’