Money worries and bankruptcy rumours – the Yorks almost lost it all but now Fergie is working hard to plug the fina ncial hole that her ex-husband (who she still lives with) has left, writes roy al biographer Emily Andrews
She was once a royal joke – the divorced duchess who sold a diet book and tried to sell access to her husband, bringing peril to the monarchy.
How times have changed. There is no better rehabilitation engine than time and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, aka Fergie, has been through the mill to emerge even brighter on the other side.
Even before her shock diagnosis of breast cancer and single mastectomy last summer, she has been a committed campaigner on women’s health and charity fundraiser.
Now, as a glamorous granny and prolific book writer, and with even a recent stint as a host on ITV’s This Morning, Sarah, 64, has the respectability and independence she has long craved. She has become such a fixture at the ITV studios that after appearing on Lorraine Kelly’s show recently, the presenter handed over to This Morning host Dermot O’Leary joking, ‘I’ll send Sarah round,’ before telling Fergie, ‘Pop round and then you can read the news later!’
Still living with her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, in Windsor’s Royal Lodge, it is her income that seems to be keeping both of them afloat after the Duke of York’s disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview which, amongst other things, cost him his role in British public life.
Borrowing
It seems money has always been a problem for the high-rolling Yorks, and back in 2011 Fergie dealt directly with the fact that she had accepted £15,000 from Andrew’s friend Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted paedophile who was to take his own life in 2019. The money was to help restructure her debts. She said she was ‘just so contrite I cannot say’ – a press strategy that might have saved her ex-husband’s reputation had he been half as proactive.
The Fergie of yore, who reportedly delighted Prince Philip with her dirty jokes when she married into The Firm in 1986, was a tabloid dream pitted against the ‘saintly’ Princess Diana, but the joke soon wore thin. In 2010, she was caught on camera promising a tabloid reporter disguised as a businessman access to Prince Andrew in exchange for £500,000. She embarked on a series of media apologies, a self-pitying book and a TV series on the Oprah Winfrey channel, in which the likes of Dr. Phil provided brutal diagnoses of her shortcomings.
