Boris Johnson sent Kate Garraway sweet message when Derek Draper was unconscious

Kate Garraway has opened up about the message she received from prime minister Boris Johnson after her husband Derek Draper was put into a coma as Covid-19 shut down his lungs.

The Good Morning Britain presenter has been coping on her own for nearly six months as Derek – now in a minimally conscious state – remains in hospital, his body ravaged by the deadly coronavirus and facing an uphill climb to get back to any kind of good health.

And at the worst of it, when doctors told her six times Derek was going to die, Kate said she had support from a surprising source: Number 10.

“Boris hand-wrote me a really lovely note saying he was thinking about me and Carrie [Symonds, his fiancee] has sent us messages via other people saying she knows it’s very tough. So I have seen a very human side to them,” she told You magazine.

“Boris’s public face gets a lot of stick but the challenge is that politicians are all in the dark just like us.”

Mr Johnson himself battled coronavirus back in April, and was so ill with it he had to be admitted to intensive care for specialist treatment.

His father Stanley Johnson – like Kate, a veteran of the I’m A Celebrity jungle – later said Boris nearly “took one for the team”.

At the time, Kate sent her best wishes to the prime minister when her GMB co-star Piers Morgan shared a picture of him to  Instagram.

“Get well Boris x,” she wrote on it.

Kate and Derek should have been celebrating their wedding anniversary this week with a vow renewal ceremony, after he proposed to her for a second time when she came out of the jungle last December.

Instead, their future is unclear and Derek’s life still hangs in the balance because of all the damage done to his organs, cells and blood vessels from Covid-19.

“At first it was all about Derek’s lungs, but then his kidneys started failing and he was on dialysis,” she explained.

“Now they’ve realised Covid can affect every cell of the body: most recently Derek’s been having problems with his intestines. The absorption of food and vomiting are problems and they’re trying to work out whether that’s because his cells don’t produce the enzymes to digest. His liver and heart and blood vessels have been affected.”

Kate and Derek’s children, Darcey, 14, and 11-year-old Billy, were most excited to watch their parents get married again, but instead Kate’s wedding anniversary will be spent juggling work and home commitments with perhaps a FaceTime call to her husband’s bedside, where a nurse props up his phone so she can see him.

“I felt I saw everything in a new light [after the jungle],” Kate added.

“I’d always known family and friends and love were the most important thing, but after the jungle that brought it into focus even more.

“Darcey was very excited: she was planning a second wedding – God knows what she’d have had me wearing. But now that won’t be happening and our anniversary will be very strange.”