Kate Garraway has spoken publicly for the first time about her new romance, telling an interviewer at the Chelsea Flower Show that “it is lovely” as she addressed the relationship in public for the first time. The 59-year-old presenter, who was widowed in January 2024 after Derek Draper died following a lengthy battle with Covid, said the pair have barely had time for a proper date.

“We basically haven't really had time for a proper date! I don't want to jinx it! I don't want to say anything because I will jinx it! I will jinx it. We all love an Irishman don't we?” she said. Garraway also said her new partner had asked whether, now that they were in the papers, they could finally have proper dates.

The development puts a public face on a relationship that has been building quietly in the background. Garraway and Draper married in 2005 and had two children, Darcey, 20, and Billy, 16. Since Draper's death, she has kept working as a presenter and has also appeared in The Traitors: Celebrity and The Masked Singer, keeping a busy schedule while navigating life after loss.

Last week, Garraway was spotted cheering on Liam Halligan at an event where he cycled from London to Paris in 24 hours to raise funds for Duchenne UK. Halligan, an Irish-British economist and journalist who hosts The Telegraph's weekly Planet Normal podcast, later wrote in the Spectator that the romance was still early days and that there was a “definite spark.”

The detail that matters now is not just that Garraway has a new relationship, but that she chose to acknowledge it herself rather than let the story be told entirely by others. For a presenter whose private life has been watched closely since Draper's illness and death, that is a clear sign she is willing to move forward on her own terms, even if she is not ready to call it anything more than early days.