Fergie on manoeuvres for Prince Andrew
She’s the keeper of the Queen’s corgis who says Prince Andrew is a ‘very kind man’ and Her Majesty told her to just ‘be yourself’. The Duchess of York has been unleashed.
Stay with me when I say that Sarah Ferguson has said something interesting. “I have been invisible for my own self for a very long time now,” she told an American magazine last week, “and so now I’m just beginning to sort of liberate and sort of test the waters, right?”
Strip away all the words that don’t need to be in that sentence and what you’re left with is a simple fact: Fergie is on manoeuvres. What could possibly go wrong?
Item number one on her agenda appears to be to invoke Queen Elizabeth II in a flurry of interviews.
“She was my total idol,” she told People magazine last week, in a publicity blitz for her new romantic novel. “She put you at ease straight away, because it’s terrifying, you know? I used to sit there for hours thinking ‘Oh my gosh, this is somebody’s lifetime [wish] to have an audience with the Queen and I’m sitting here having tea.’ ”
Item number two is to bring on the corgis. Fergie and her ex-husband, the Duke of York, gave the Queen two corgis, Sandy and Muick, and inherited them when she died. The dogs are now, Fergie assured her American public, “national icons” and when they bark at nothing it is a sure sign that the Queen is “passing by”. She feels sure that HM is comforted, from beyond the grave, that the magnolia trees in Windsor Great Park are now in bloom and that her dogs “were walking where she walked before”. Fergie’s sense of duty, moreover, stems from wanting “to uphold exactly the way the Queen did it”.
She then went out for lunch with a journalist at the River Cafe. Having drizzled balsamic vinegar over her mozzarella, she reminisced to The Daily Telegraph about long walks with HM, during which the Queen listened but never judged.
“During the last three years,” she explained, “her poor son has been going through such a tumultuous time, and I think HM was very relieved I could help her with him, so we became even closer then.” For good measure she added that HM was “more of a mother to me than my own mother”. Her mother eloped with an Argentinian polo player when Fergie was a teenager.
Now there’s another new interview, this time with Hello! magazine. Alas, Fergie did not invite us into the lovely home that she shares with Prince Andrew, Royal Lodge, or pose with the corgis in the orangery. She did, though, say that whether Andrew moves out is a matter for him and his brother, the King. Andrew, she added, receives no money from the taxpayer since he “stepped back” from royal duties, and she is therefore “pleased and proud to support him”. Her first romantic novel, written with a ghostwriter, met an uncertain critical reception but sold a respectable 11,000 copies in Britain.
“For many years now,” she said, “I’ve really pushed to look after my girls and contribute to York family life.”
It’s 37 years since Fergie bounced on to the national stage, marrying the man who was seen in 1986 as a dashing prince and Falklands war hero. She was greeted as a welcome injection of informality into the royal family and a breath of fresh air; a riot in a sailor suit and big velvet hair bows. In 1988 the happy couple were dispatched on a royal tour of California. It did not go well. The Sunday Times described Andrew as looking like a Third Division footballer on a night out at the Hippodrome. Fergie looked like she’d just won third prize for a Carmen Miranda impersonation at the end of the pier.
Their eldest child, Beatrice, was born in 1988 and Eugenie in 1990. Two years later the marriage was over. When the royals were breakfasting at Balmoral one day in summer 1992, the front pages carried photos of Fergie’s toes being sucked by her “financial adviser” John Bryan. She was back in London by lunchtime and, rumour has it, never under the same roof as the Duke of Edinburgh again. She and Andrew separated that year and finally divorced in 1996.
At the time courtiers said that she had received pounds 350,000 in cash, pounds 500,000 from the Queen to buy a house for herself and the children, and a monthly allowance. However, she was, she complained at one point, perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy.
Over the years she has been variously an ambassador for WeightWatchers and for the Italian region of Puglia, the latter possibly thanks to her friendship with Nancy Dell’Olio. If you can tell anything about a person by their friends, we could usefully pause to consider Dell’Olio, once a famous woman about town.
I’ve met her, and her relationship with reality was - how to put this politely? - tenuous. She told me that she was looking for a man who would help look after her children. “You don’t have any children,” I said. She nodded.
“I never wanted children. I was very clear.”
In her bid to add value to York family life, Fergie has written books and designed china tea sets. She has flogged blenders to punters on QVC and her ex-husband to the News of the World.
“I very deeply regret the situation and the embarrassment caused,” she said in a statement after a cash-for-access sting in 2010, acknowledging a “serious lapse in judgment”. She put it down to her financial situation being “under stress”.
These days things are sufficiently solvent, somehow, to enable her to pay nearly pounds 5 million in cash for a mews house in Belgravia, central London. Described as a “nest egg” for her daughters, she can’t sell it without their agreement. On the side she has a deal involving “nature inspired” fountain pens that cost pounds 1,600 and another with an online platform selling NFTs. She was paid a fortune in 2019 for being a “brand ambassador” by a Turkish businessman. His company was later described in the High Court as “a front for money laundering” (both Fergie and the businessman deny wrongdoing).
Then there was the ski chalet in Verbier, for which Andrew and Fergie found pounds 18 million from goodness knows where in 2014, and bought it off a French socialite who later described him as “an absolute fool”. After many carefree family hols on the Swiss pistes, the chalet was eventually sold around the time of his settlement with Virginia Giuffre.
Today Fergie is said to have a new “friendship” with a wealthy 72-year-old Texan called Trammell Crow Jr, who has a ponytail and many billions in the bank. According to The Sunday Times they are “bonding over environmental issues”. Ten years ago she described Andrew as “still my handsome prince. He will always be my handsome prince.”
“It is really sad to see what Andrew has been through,” she said recently, adding: “Perception is so important. It can make or break someone. I’m living with someone - at least when I’m in England and lucky enough to be a guest at Royal Lodge - and I see what that perception has done to a very kind man.”
In the same conversation she talked about her charity work helping blind Ukrainians and her many scars, which she said were “really, really big. Because they come from major obstacles.” In recent days she has popped up in Los Angeles, where it is rumoured she might be handing out an Oscar this weekend. She claims to be in talks to turn her romantic novels into “a major US TV series” and doesn’t rule out making a documentary. But for that, and anything else that might pay the bills, she needs royal currency, not a disgraced ex-husband, and nothing gives currency more than walking into Westminster Abbey on May 6. With her customary subtlety she has duly launched a campaign to get an invitation to the coronation.
“I think it’ll be an extraordinary moment, and I feel really strongly that the King is brilliant,” she has said. “He upholds everything that is good. I mean, what he’s done for the environment! What he’s done in his life! How he loves to paint! How he loves to be! He is,” she concluded triumphantly, “a very special person.”
The Queen, she alleges, told her “be yourself. All anyone wants is for you to just be yourself.” We will never know if recollections may vary. Maybe the past 40 years have been a rehearsal. At 63 it sounds like Sarah Ferguson might just be getting started.
THE TIMES
