Would MIND care to distance themselves from Dolly?

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Spin Cycle

"Machiavellian, me? Nah!" snorts Draper. "After all my years in politics I've been around some incredibly Machiavellian people, I can tell you – and I can't begin to compete with some of them."



Would he care to name names? Baron Mandelson, perhaps? "Actually, no. With Peter, I promise you, what you see is what you get."



"Just like you, darling," purrs Garraway, adding that if Draper were a Machiavellian, then he would be much more practised at the golden art of putting up and shutting up. "And you're not. A true Machiavellian would use silence. You always speak out," she says. The unsaid "unfortunately" hangs in the air as she nibbles on a chocolate chip cookie, her remedy to cope with the morning sickness that has plagued her second pregnancy. If she didn't eat all the time, she'd have to keep getting up off the GMTV sofa to throw up, "which would not be very attractive at all".



Sofas bring us to another well-upholstered item of furniture – the analyst's couch, since we're here to talk about Draper's new self-help book, Life Support: A Survival Guide for the Modern Soul, in which he puts himself on the couch while offering words of wisdom about the root causes of unhappiness.



There's also candid advice on how to break free from them, much of it gleaned from his private psychotherapy practice in Marylebone, London, as well as his work on depression for which he has won an award from the mental health charity, MIND.