When Derek Draper was in California, studying to be a shrink, one of his American friends came rushing into class, screaming, “Derek, I’ve Googled you! And back in England there’s another Derek Draper, who did some terrible things!”

Draper, 41, rocks with laughter. His dark past will not go away. The nicknames have stuck, for starters. In the 1990s, when he rose to prominence first as bag-carrier to the Labour spinmeister Peter Mandelson and then as arch-lobbyist, he was famous enough to warrant two gossip-column sobriquets: Dolly and Muttley (the hapless canine aide to the cartoon baddie Dick Dastardly).

The flash Dolly cut a flamboyant figure at private London drinking holes, driving around in a vintage Mercedes and indulging in carnal (and nasal) pursuits. His fall was always going to be dramatic, and it came in 1998 with the savage swiftness of Greek tragedy. When he was caught claiming he could secure access to Tony Blair for cash, he lost three jobs in one day: the Mandelson gig, his Daily Express column and the editorship of Progress, the new Labour magazine he had founded.

He had a breakdown and at first it seemed the end for the working-class lad from Chorley, Lancashire. After a spell at the Priory, he went to America to start a new life as a psychotherapist. “I was a ticking time bomb,” he says, “a cocky know-it-all, masking unhappiness and a feeling that I didn’t quite belong.” He had in fact been suffering from depression for several years before he checked himself in.

He is physically different these days, though. No longer the fresh-faced whippersnapper, he has a straggly new beard and a few pounds more around his middle.

“I should have done this before you arrived,” he says, tucking into a sandwich, his Lancashire accent soft and flat, “because now you’ll say I’m a fat bastard. That’s what they say about me on the internet.”

Does he miss his time as a spin doctor? “If you mean what Peter used to call ‘hand-to-hand combat with the media’, then no,” he says. “If you mean occasionally talking to journalists about my take on things, then yes.”

Thanks to his glitzy wife, the GMTV presenter Kate Garraway, Draper has continued to talk to journalists quite a lot since his banishment, what with Mr and Mrs pieces about who does the washing-up, and occasional forays into OK! magazine.

He now knows he does not have what it takes to be a politician. He likes looking after his daughter Darcey, 3, when Kate is at work, and he is clearly excited about the arrival of their second child in August.

His new self-help book, Life Support: A Survival Guide for the Modern Soul, is full of common sense and enjoys a warm authorial tone of understanding.

He is relieved to have ditched the drugs and the crazy sex – he frequently refers to his old pastimes in the book with a kind of clinical distaste – but, well, it was quite a moment, was it not?

“I was interested in politics. And shagging,” he says candidly. “And ideally, the two things together. Go to conference, pull the fittest girl from Labour students, make a speech. My idea of heaven.” Not quite the manner of a neo Nye Bevan, it must be said.

He wryly acknowledges that all his fellow bag carriers – James Pur-nell, Andy Burnham, Ed Balls et al – are now in the cabinet. How did they get there when he did not?

“All those people are quite solid and sound.” Does that mean they were not in his drug-taking coterie? “I’m not going to go there. The Tories, now, are a different matter.” Does that mean you were snorting cocaine with the Conservatives? “I won’t be drawn on that,” he says, grinning. “I think the greatest quote is from George Bush, who, when accused of taking coke at Yale, said: ‘When I was young and immature, I was young and immature.’ Actually, the Labour lot were very boring,” he says with a laugh.

“I think the most extreme substance anyone took – apart from me – was a single malt whisky.”

And yet he still feels “the twitch on the thread of political life”, and with his new website, labourlist.org, he is edging his way back. Engineered for “Labour-minded people”, the site is just the beginning. He is proud of his new baby, although one Labour blogger has intimated that Dolly’s return to the fold has been greeted like “a cup of cold sick”.

Never mind. Draper clearly loves being back in the limelight and exudes confidence about his creation. “It’s been up for two months and there have been over 300 posts from over 100 different posters ranging from cabinet ministers to branch secretaries,” says Draper, who once described his politics as “the bastard child of Roy Hattersley and Neil Kinnock”. At Manchester University, his bedroom was decorated not with the Athena poster of the tennis player scratching her bottom, but with a poster of Hattersley.

“I want there to be a Labour voice on the internet by the time of the election, so that our people have somewhere to go online for their politics,” he says.

He still has the same old chutzpah and belief in “his people”, and although he is principally a psycho-analyst, debating, scheming and poli-ticking sit twitchily in his marrow. If his years in therapy have taught him anything, it is that he should graciously accept his natural inclina-tions. “I am tribally Labour,” he says.

He got the idea for the website after he volunteered as a campaign adviser to Ray Collins, Labour’s new general secretary, who according to Draper was struggling with a lack of party resources.

“I can’t remember what the debt is, and it’s ring-fenced, but the party is impoverished,” he says.

He quickly realised what was needed. “When I sat down to do the party’s campaigning strategy, the massive hole was its online presence. I looked at what the Conservatives had, and it was very good. And then there is Guido Fawkes [an online political blogger who enjoys baiting Draper]. What Labour had was dreadful,” he says.

He is still getting into scraps, of course. When Guido Fawkes’s Paul Staines accused Draper of a Jeffrey Archer-style exaggeration of his psychotherapy qualifications, he hotly denied the allegations. Staines’s response? “Come on Derek, serve that writ or you can f**k off.” Draper kisses it off with a “ridiculous”. Plus ça change, eh?

Life Support: A Survival Guide for the Modern Soul will be published on Thursday by Hay House at £8.99

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