For nearly four long years, love kept Derek Draper alive. The tireless devotion of his wife Kate Garraway, supported by extraordinary medical care from the NHS, enabled him to defy all the odds.

The former political adviser and businessman survived a devastating bout of Covid at the beginning of the pandemic, and kept battling through months of therapy until he was able to be nursed at home.

Despite grim predictions by doctors that, after three months in a coma, he might never speak again, he regained consciousness and fought to learn to talk again. At the end of 2021, he was able to tell his family out loud: ‘I love you’.

They knew, of course. But to hear it from his lips was a miracle.

The fight could not go on for ever. Today, it emerged that after being forced to return to hospital earlier this month, Derek died on Wednesday with his wife at his bedside. He was 56.

For nearly four years, love kept Derek Draper alive. The tireless devotion of his wife Kate Garraway, supported by extraordinary medical care from the NHS, enabled him to defy all odds. Above: Derek and his wife heading for a pub lunch last April

The former political adviser and businessman survived a devastating bout of Covid at the beginning of the pandemic, and kept battling through months of therapy until he was able to be nursed at home

His long illness, and Kate’s unquenchable determination to help him recover and to never give up hope, came to symbolise the impact of Covid on millions of families across Britain.

If the good-humoured courage of Captain Sir Tom Moore reflected our national spirit, Derek Draper and Kate Garraway stood for our quiet resolve to withstand the very worst this disease could throw at us.

Just as the country had no inkling of what lay ahead in March 2020, when the first cases were emerging in Britain, Derek could not have guessed how badly Covid would hit him when he developed symptoms that month.

Days earlier, he tweeted a link to a collection of Covid resources and advice on Kate’s health-and-lifestyle website. He called her ‘my wonderful wife’. It would be his last tweet.

On March 30, he told her he had a bad headache and was struggling to breathe. ‘God, you look ill,’ she said, and when Derek admitted he had numbness in one hand, she called their friend Dr Hilary Jones, the Good Morning Britain [GMB] medic.

‘I think you need to call an ambulance,’ he said. Derek was taken to Whittington Hospital in north London.

‘Go inside and make the children feel safe,’ he told Kate as he left. ‘They’re going to be panicking about this.’ For the next two days, he sent pictures and messages of reassurance, promising everyone that he was getting better.

But after a sudden decline, he was placed in a medically induced coma. It would be 374 days before he came home.

Despite grim predictions by doctors that, after three months in a coma, he might never speak again, he regained consciousness and fought to learn to talk again. At the end of 2021, he was able to tell his family out loud: ‘I love you’.

The weeks and months that followed were of course traumatic for the whole country. Shocked by the imposition of a national lockdown, and with the scale of the escalating crisis revealed in daily bulletins, millions struggled to cope with the sacrifices demanded.

The eruption of a new disease that was killing dozens and soon hundreds daily was terrifying enough. But for countless families, worse still was the isolation from loved ones.

Children and grandchildren could not visit parents in care homes. Brothers and sisters living on the same street were unable to knock on each others doors. Most unbearable of all, people could not be with their closest loved ones, even during their dying moments, in hospital.

Every day, scores of people died alone, without a goodbye or a hand to hold.

The ordeal of Kate, Derek and their two children, Darcey and Billy, touched the whole country, because so many of us were enduring similar grief.

Each of Kate’s updates, as he lay unconscious, hurt far more than the prosaic bulletins from statisticians and epidemiologists at government press conferences. Derek became the human face of their impersonal data.

Derek and Kate are seen on their wedding day in 2005. The couple had two children together

In April, after revealing that she had mild Covid symptoms herself, Kate told friends at GMB that ‘it remains an excruciatingly worrying time’ while he was in intensive care.

A few days later, in a message to viewers, she said: ‘I’m afraid he is still in a deeply critical condition but he is still here, which means there is hope.’

The following month, Kate vowed: ‘I’ll never give up because Derek’s the love of my life.’ But she admitted she was racked with uncertainty and said her heart sank every time the doctors explained what fresh damage the virus was doing to her husband’s body.

On six occasions, she was warned that he was unlikely to live. But still he clung on.

It was July before Derek woke from his coma, and then only to open his eyes by a flicker. Doctors advised Kate to return to work for the sake of her own health and, without her husband’s income (he was a political lobbyist and author) she had little choice but to comply.

It was the end of that month before, lockdown restrictions having eased somewhat, she could visit the hospital, the first time she had been able to hold his hand for four months. That was, she said, ‘extra emotional’ but also frustrating to see how slow his recovery was.

‘His eyes are opening but we have no real knowledge of what he can see or hear or feel,’ she told GMB’s Susanna Reid.

‘It’s a very desperate situation. The doctors do keep saying it is a miracle he’s still alive. One said: ‘He’s as sick as anyone I’ve seen in 35 years in medicine, never mind Covid.’ They don’t know how much better he can get. There’s nothing to compare it with.’

The following month in August, she and the children were able to visit for his birthday, an occasion she described as ‘challenging’. Derek was still losing weight, and needed a ventilator to breathe.

Friends rallied round from the start. Robert Rinder, the TV barrister, a neighbour, started doing the family shopping, picking up everything from a pint of milk to a packet of Blu-tac for a school project.

David Beckham sent video clips for the children, Amanda Holden pinged texts of love and support, and when the phone rang one morning it was Elton John, who said he remembered the couple in his prayers every night.

The friendships were real, but the celebrity status revealed how, in a way Derek could never have expected, he had come to represent everyone who was seriously ill, everyone whose family was desperate and helpless.

No one who knew him 25 years earlier, as a brash New Labour strategist, could have predicted it.

In his 20s, he was nicknamed Muttley, the sidekick to Dastardly Peter Mandelson. Born in Chorley, Lancashire, he took a degree at Manchester University and as a student activist began a career in politics, branching out as a lobbyist.

A tireless networker, he landed a column on a national newspaper and a slot on Talk Radio. ‘I came from a loving but poor, working-class background,’ he told a reporter.

‘My parents never had any savings. Now I can help them. I do drink champagne and some people resent that.’

But his glamorous, multi-faceted life imploded spectacularly in 1998 when an undercover reporter from a Sunday newspaper taped him boasting about his power as a lobbyist with access to ministers.

‘There are 17 people who count in this government,’ he crowed. ‘To say I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century.’ The implications of corruption sparked a political scandal, dubbed Lobbygate.

Sacked from his various jobs, he decided to make a fresh start and spent three years in the States, training as a therapist. But when he returned to the UK in 2004, he found the lure of politics too strong to resist and launched a website called LabourList.

Derek and Kate pose for a photo in 2019, when the TV presenter appeared on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here

A brief association with Gordon Brown’s spin doctor Damian McBride proved disastrous. McBride and Draper were accused of plotting to launch an online gossip sheet aimed at spreading fake news about prominent Tories.

With his reputation in shreds again, Derek issued a public apology but added: ‘Part of me feels like I have been an innocent victim and another part of me, in the dark night of the soul, feels like I just attract controversy.’

Chastened, he decided to concentrate on his therapy business, with the support of Kate, whom he married in 2005.

Their relationship was tested to its limits during the gruelling months of his recovery. Kate began recording a video diary, as her house was radically restructured by builders, in the hope that Derek could be nursed at home.

The back of the building was demolished, wheelchair ramps were installed, the living room was converted to house medical equipment, and the children did their homework with the furniture under plastic dust sheets.

No one who saw the footage, aired in a documentary called Finding Derek in March 2021, could fail to be moved by the family’s unwavering determination.

Kate recognised that countless people related to her experience, including many whose lives were shattered not by Covid but by other illnesses. ‘We always talk about that role of care and support at home, and how big it is,’ she said, ‘but until you’re actually at the coal face of it – I thought I got it before, but I get it now.

‘It’s an extraordinary, overwhelming responsibility that many people are facing.’

Part of the burden, she knew, was that even when progress happened, it did not always feel like a victory. In October 2020, looking at his wife’s face on screen via a video call, Derek managed to say his first word. It was ‘pain’.

In April 2021, at the tail end of the third lockdown, he was finally able to go home. ‘It was amazing,’ she said, describing the moment she brought him back.

He joined his wife at Buckingham Palace in June last year in his wheelchair, where she received an MBE from Prince William

‘As we pulled up, I could see two little faces of Darcey, 17, and Billy, 14, looking out of the window and I could literally see them go: ‘He’s here!’ They ran out and opened the door. He immediately burst into tears, there was a lot of hugging and we got him inside. He absolutely knew he was home.’

But there was no hiding how much completely Derek’s care would have to dominate their lives. ‘It does feel a little bit like the hospital has come home with me,’ Kate said. ‘It’s 24-hour care. I haven’t really slept.’

The delight of their children made all the upheaval worthwhile. Derek’s bed was turned so that he was facing the garden, and throughout the summer Darcey and Billy tried to include their father in their games.

‘They were running up to the door going: “Dad, Dad, watch this.” They’ve both just not stopped cuddling him.’

But Kate also had to face the debilitating changes in the man she loved. His muscles had atrophied and he was unable to move. Occasionally he could mouth a few words, including – most important of all – ‘I love you’.

By December 2022, he was able to join a family outing to a Christmas pantomime. It seemed he might have embarked on a new stage of recovery, but over the next few months a slow reversal set in.

He joined his wife at Buckingham Palace in June last year in his wheelchair, where she received an MBE from Prince William. In the face of cruel criticism, she said that she had not received the award for looking after her husband – as so many others do – but for her charity work and services to broadcasting.

‘Covid devastated him,’ Kate told Piers Morgan. ‘From the top of his head to the tip of his toe. His digestive system, his liver, his kidneys, his heart, his nervous system. We’re pretty sure that the inflammation did pass through his brain. Fundamentally, he’s in a terrible state.’

He fought for more than three years but, in the end, the damage was more than his body could stand.

But his resilience and the endless love and courage of Kate have been an inspiration to millions.

On a nature ramble last year for BBC2’s Walking With series, Kate rested beside an oak that had been struck by lightning. Her eyes filled with tears.

‘They don’t give up,’ she said, ‘even when their roots have been shaken to the core.’