The Daily Mail’s Richard Kay wrote a lengthy piece about Sarah Ferguson and how she is finally, at long last, truly out in the cold. Last fall was the beginning of the end. That was when Sarah’s 2011 email to Jeffrey Epstein came out, and people could see for themselves in black-and-white that she had lied about the nature of their relationship and lied about cutting off contact with Epstein. The latest emails, released two Fridays ago, between Epstein and Sarah show that it was even worse than anyone imagined. Sarah was in turns desperate and obsequious, pandering and begging for money, willing to debase herself and her daughters to serve Epstein. So now Fergie is almost completely out of Royal Lodge, and no one knows where she’ll go now. Some highlights from Kay’s piece:
Fergie’s next steps: Her ultimate destination is not known. According to friends she will be ‘overseas’ for several weeks. Some suspect she will be based at her daughter Princess Eugenie’s home in Portugal. Others suggest she may be travelling further afield to Australia, where her sister Jane Makim has long lived. Once her bulging address book would ensure she could be folded into discreet social currents almost anywhere on the planet she wished. How striking then that some of her old circle were insisting she was not with them, among them the Virgin tycoon Sir Richard Branson who said she was not on his private Caribbean island, while another friend holidaying on exclusive Mustique, the royals’ favourite hideaway, tells me she’s not there either.
Fergie dreams of a comeback: All we can be sure of is that she won’t disappear for long. And then? ‘Well, she won’t be hiding away,’ says a close figure. ‘It is not her style. It’s true she needs some space now; this whole saga has dominated her life for the last five years, making it impossible for her to think about anything else. She has been in the middle of it all and it has undermined her resilience.’ Being away from Royal Lodge, away from Andrew, will, says her friend, enable her ‘to be reputationally freer.’ According to this same figure, however, she will continue to live in Britain. The details are still to be finalised, but I am told she has found a property in Windsor which she has identified as the place where she can ‘rebuild her life’ and ‘start again.’
The difference this time: Even after she was unmasked attempting to sell access to Andrew through the notorious ‘fake sheikh’, she managed to retain her reputation with a forgiving public as an accident-prone but essentially harmless adornment to national life, admired for her ability to recover from adversity. But however much shame and opprobrium she received, two things always insulated her – the Duchess of York title that she prized above all else and the luxury of Royal Lodge, the graceful imperial address where she could retreat to lick her wounds and where she was always treated as royalty. Now both have gone, along with her quasi-royal standing.
Fergie hoodwinked the king?? It is tempting to wonder how the King, having welcomed her back into the Windsor fold with an invitation to return behind the royals’ velvet rope that Christmas Day at Sandringham just two years ago, must feel now. Even if he didn’t know the full extent of her extraordinary egregious dealings with Epstein, she certainly did. Charles is left with questions about his judgment when, really, Fergie should have resisted his kindness and any rapprochement. For surely, she must have known that every word of her incomprehensibly misjudged dealings with the grotesque financier would eventually come spewing out at the tap of a computer key. Surely too she must have known that it was not just her relationship with Epstein hiding in plain sight but the relationship she also exposed her daughters to.
I absolutely believe that Sarah is delusional enough to believe that she can come back, and that she should make a comeback! Like, she absolutely believes that people are dying to see her next act, waiting to see her land on her feet yet again. Speaking of, Tom Sykes has a source who insists that Sarah is talking about writing another memoir:
Sarah Ferguson had been going to and from Royal Lodge “lying prone on the back seat” of a car to evade observation and is “in talks with a ghostwriter to pen a memoir about her devastating fall from grace.”
The Daily Mail also cites a source as saying that a defiant Andrew “firmly believes he’s done nothing wrong and definitely feels hard done by and too harshly treated.”
The report also confirms something I reported in my exclusive about Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie yesterday, that neither daughter wants her moving in with them “because of the attendant unwelcome publicity it would bring.” My source told me: “The last thing Beatrice wants is the press camped outside her home to get pictures of Sarah.”
A friend of Beatrice, who lives in a trendy Cotswolds village not far from the rural outpost of U.K. members club Soho House, said she is struggling as the “stress” of her family’s unravelling takes its toll.
“She can’t eat, she can’t sleep. She is so stressed out,” the friend said.
Meanwhile, a friend of Eugenie, the younger princess, who lives in Portugal, with her husband, Jack Brooksbank, told me that she fears she will have to completely cut ties with her father in order to preserve her status in the philanthropic world, as the patron of an anti-slavery charity she founded several years ago.
I think Beatrice and Eugenie are the only ones to actually understand that there’s no coming back for their parents? But as I said, I believe that Sarah and Andrew are both delusional, to the point where they’re both arrogantly making plans for how they’ll shimmy out of this jam. As for Sarah writing another book… eh. I think she could get a publishing contract, absolutely. There are a lot of publishers who would throw low six-figures at Fergie for a trainwreck narrative in a hurry. But yeah… it’s interesting that the monarchy is making an effort to keep Andrew close and silent, but they don’t give a sh-t about Sarah and her next moves. Probably because they think no one will really care at this point.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
