Derek Draper — Rest in Peace
Derek Draper, who has died, was an incredible force of nature, dominating every room he was in, making everyone laugh, or cringe, or angry, depending on his intent. He was famous at Chorley Sixth Form College, even before Manchester University or the Labour Party. He possessed a fierce intellectual commitment to the social democratic politics of the Labour Party, as well as down-and-dirty political organising skills, which drew him into the ambit of Labour’s leading modernisers in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
He was the first person I ever saw with a mobile phone. It was Manchester in the late 1980s, and somehow he had persuaded the student union to fund it. He was the founder of the Manchester University Fabian Society, a ruthless organiser against the Trots in Manchester University Labour Club, and within the National Union of Students (NUS). He had a picture, not of Che Guevarra or Karl Marx, but of Roy Hattersley on the wall of his student digs. Yet he remained on good terms with the likes of Ken Livingstone and Len McClusky.
Intrigue and scandal followed him around, like a political Icarus. His first fall from grace was at Manchester when he took umbrage to something about him in the UMIST student newspaper and decided to destroy the print run. He found himself out in the cold — literally as they changed the locks of his office. He reinvented himself as the aide to Newcastle’s fixer-in-chief Nick Brown, and from there to his central role with Peter Mandelson in the crucial period before Blair’s election as leader 30 years ago.
He founded Progress, and Labour List, both of which continue as important Labour institutions. His account of Blair’s First Hundred Days remains the best, breathless account of those heady days. It had possibly more authors than readers (that’s Derek’s own joke, by the way) but it proved how he could marshal people to a cause. His hand is all over the Liddle and Mandelson book too, not least the fulsome dedication to…Derek Draper.
I was proud to count him as a friend. The most 90s thing I ever did was to go as Derek’s guest to the Groucho Club where he was almost as much of a fixture as Julie Burchill. There, in one of the upstairs rooms, he chatted to John Thompson from Cold Feet, in a space where Naomi Campbell and Robbie Williams were hanging out. Derek ordered champagne, of course.
He matured as a husband and father. Once he visited us in Eastbourne with the kids for a swim in the English channel, and his deep love for his wife and children was so clear. His professional work and writing was admired within a whole new circle, although politics remained his favourite hobby. Everyone who know him — and there are thousands of us — has their own stories about Derek Draper: funny, outrageous, loyal, never a dull moment. That he should be struck down, and then taken from us so young, is especially unfair and cruel.
