Kate Garraway responds to cruel trolls who said she was wrong to laugh on GMB return after death of husband

Kate Garraway has responded to social media trolls who said she was wrong to laugh upon her return to Good Morning Britain.

The presenter, who lost her husband Derek Draper after a two-year long battle with long Covid, said she’d been getting “some flack” on Good Morning Britain on Friday (9 February).

Draper, a former political lobbyist, died on 3 January aged 56, nearly four years after he was admitted to the hospital with a severe case of Covid.

Garraway returned to the show on Thursday, just days after the funeral of her husband. She was reunited with her friend and co-host Ben Shephard and said she’d received criticism for laughing during the programme.

“I got a bit of flack on social media yesterday for laughing with you as though that would imply I didn’t care,” she said to Shephard on GMB. “But when you laughing you’re laughing because you want the joy that person brought to continue.

“And you know that people watching at home have got troubles in their life and you want to share that joy with them. So it’s a licence to laugh and to cry and to be all things.”

Shephard joked that she should always be encouraged to laugh at his jokes. He said: “You always need to be encouraged to laugh when I make a joke,” prompting more laughs from Garraway.

She described how she was at the “first stages” of grief during a conversation with actor Larry Lamb, 76, whose brother died in 2019.

The pair also discussed the difficulties families faced at not being able to hold full funerals for their loved ones during the coronavirus pandemic.

She revealed that people did not know what to say to her daughter Darcey, 17, who was a pallbearer at her father’s funeral and her son Billy, 14.

The GMB host, who had taken a break from the show since 2014, discussed the reasons behind her decision to return to the show on Thursday, before telling her co-hosts “we have to pick ourselves up and go on”.

Garraway said on Thursday (8 January) that it was lovely but “odd” to be back in the ITV studio, having briefly appeared on the show via video link earlier in the week.

Shephard told her she had “done Derek proud” for the way she had dealt with her husband’s death and funeral.

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