One woman who can save the royals from latest Prince Andrew scandal
As the latest Prince Andrew debacle spreads, King Charles has turned to one single and surprising person to rescue the royal family.
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Let me tell you the perfect Christmas story about an unusual and wondrous figure; someone taunted, persecuted, harassed and crucified, who then rose on the third day to put out a Mills & Boon novel.
I mean, of course, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, former pariah, black sheep, decades-long liability and woman banned from being in Prince Philip’s presence, and the woman who just saved the royal family’s Christmas.
Who needs three wise men when you can have one vaguely, sometimes, sensible duchess?
Somehow this week, we have arrived at a point where King Charles has wholly relied on the former bankrupt and home shopping network juice maker hype woman to pull Buckingham Palace out of the maw of a massive PR debacle.
The tables haven’t so much turned as spun completely off their axis.
Last week, the news broke that a “close confidant” of Prince Andrew, the Duke of York – a man already infamous for his appalling lack of judgement, taste and credible alibis – was in fact an alleged Chinese spy who has now been barred from the UK for national security reasons.
It gets worse. The “spy”, Yang Tengbo, was tasked by Andrew to find him Chinese investors in a fund he hoped to set up and tapped by him to head up his for-profit pitch@palace China initiative.
Yang even referred to himself as a “special envoy of Prince Andrew”, the Daily Mail has reported. MI5 is now investigating any cash that might have flowed from China to the venture.
Inside Buckingham Palace, “there are grave concerns about the depth of Andrew’s involvement with Yang”, according to the Daily Mail.
The duke has insisted he has done nothing wrong, a line that we have all heard before.
In short, after years of alarming, appalling and horrifying us, the news-reading public, here was Andrew managing to surpass our already subatomically low opinions of him.
Buckingham Palace then got to some pretty pathetic attempts at handwashing; nothing to see here guv, ‘he’s not one of us’ the prevailing line. As the crisis grew, MI5 agents jostled to not get the short straw and to have to spend hours locked up in the duke’s study slash indoor putting green asking him to remember dinners involving a lot of roast duck and backslapping in Beijing.
Meanwhile, the obvious question grew and grew: But what about Christmas?
This spy scandal had broken just in time for the royal family’s traditional bit of parading about the place and celebrating. What the hell were they going to do with the freshly retainted Duke of Yuck?
At first the King, a man still undergoing cancer treatment after 10 months, opted for a futile, if not ridiculously passive and namby-pamby strategy – hoping Andrew might do the right thing and pull out of not only their Sandringham celebrations but the annual Palace Christmas lunch too.
(The duke does not need kid gloves so much as the heavy-duty sort used for rose shearing or oyster shucking).
Enter … (wait for the sound of trumpets) the royal family’s ace in the hole, the only woman who could pull Their Majesties’ chestnuts out of the fire: Fergie.
On Thursday, 70-odd members of the extended royal family fell on the Palace to be fed, watered and have Queen Camilla politely forget their names (there are a lot of those Kents, no? And which one is the Earl of St Andrews again?)
Until even the day before, the duke was “insisting he had every right to attend”, according to the Mail.
It was a grim prospect – the optics of a puffed up duke pootering in his vast Bently into the Palace forecourt would only be horrific for Crown Inc.
But never fear, old Fergs was here.
First, the 65-year-old proved “instrumental”, per the Daily Mail, in convincing Andrew to voluntarily pull out of attending the royal family’s Christmas celebrations at Sandringham.
Then, on Wednesday, according to the Telegraph, the serial entrepreneur, tea-peddler, author and one-time Wedgewood spokes-duchess “intervened to persuade” Andrew to stay away from the Palace lunch.
His decision to officially pull out was “made in close consultation” with his ex-wife.
Charles was “very grateful” for Fergie’s “intervention”.
Too right cocoa.
All of which puts us in a very strange place indeed – where Fergie, the former perma-embarrassment and human omnishambles has somehow managed to metamorphose from walking headline to … serious royal asset.
The Fergie of 2024 is a woman who toes the line, works hard and plugs away at her charity.
She posts sweet, doting, grandmotherly updates on Instagram about her daughters Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie’s growing families and has for years now managed to keep her nose scrupulously clean.
Evidence of her revised position in the royal firmament came when, after the late Queen died in 2022, her beloved corgis Sandy and Muick were entrusted to Fergie’s care.
Further proof of how far she had come came last Christmas when, for the first time in 30 years, she was allowed to join the royal family for Sandringham celebrations and was part of the highly public walk to church, even accepting flowers from members of the public.
Oh, the irony that the woman once reviled and shunned has turned out to be the only person who stood between the House of Windsor and Andrew and ever more mortification being dumped onto the King and Crown Inc.
Let’s hope that the King has done the right thing and a Fortnum & Mason hamper the size of a Kia is currently winging its way down to Royal Lodge as a thank you. (Or at least some gold, frankincense and a stonkingly large Marks & Spencer gift card).
What has become clear this week is that Charles has been either at a total loss or unwilling to take any sort of decisive action regarding his numpty of a sibling.
Having lost the ‘Siege of Royal Lodge’ last month, failing to dislodge Andrew from the 30-room historic home and having already cut his brother off financially, the King’s ability to rein in or in any way exert control over Andrew is a big fat naught.
Looking ahead, Fergie could be set to continue to serve as the official Andrew wrangler and woman lumped with the unenviable task of drumming some sort of good sense into him.
While the duke has lost all of his official titles and patronages, he is still a member of the Order of the Garter, the highest chivalric honour. While he no longer takes part in the public parts of the Garter Day, an annual high-profile bout of pomp and circumstance, he still obstinately attends the lunch and the church service.
That Andrew might continue to be allowed to swan around with former prime ministers and the great and good is some combustible ammunition for anyone who wants to make the case that the royal family has gone entirely too easy on him.
In the Order’s nearly 700 year-long-history, only 40 members have been booted out and all for treason or heresy.
Does it surprise anyone to know there are growing calls for Andrew to suffer a similar fate and to be dumped from the Order?
Can anyone else foresee a scenario where Fergie might be called up by her very grateful former brother-in-law to lean on the duke and to try and get him to dredge up a crumb of decency and do the honourable thing for the crown?
What a turn up for the books that it is Fergie, she of the toe-sucking, she of the trying to sell access to Andrew, the woman whose name was a byword for being a cash-hungry liability is now … the person who could help prevent even more monarchical mortification.
Fergie has not so much rolled back the rock as gotten her reputation completely out of hock. Finally, we have hard proof that Christmas miracles do happen.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
Originally published as One woman who can save the royals from latest Prince Andrew scandal
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