Duchess of the right royal mess

PROFILE: SARAH FERGUSON:After years of painstakingly rebuilding her reputation, the Duchess of York has been caught out trying to cash in on her royal connections. But the shameless Fergie shouldn't be written off yet, writes KATE HOLMQUIST

A REMORSEFUL FERGIE has reportedly been forgiven by her ex-husband, Andrew, for trying to sell access to him, and she will continue to live with him in their shared home, near Ascot in England. If anyone ever doubted that the story of Sarah and her prince was one of true love between a hapless clown of a duchess and a party-loving duke not known for his intellect, they can believe it now. And the story could even have a happy ending for Fergie’s career, with none other than Queen Oprah granting her a huge TV audience in the US next Tuesday.

Fergie's life since marrying and divorcing Britain's Prince Andrew has been one embarrassing social mishap after another. While still married she was photographed, topless, having her toes sucked by a man not her husband. In happier times she was gobsmacklingly raucous in the ill-considered TV show It's a Royal Knockout,in which she flung herself around in a medieval dress in jolly-hockey-sticks manner. Also notable was a bun-throwing incident on a first-class flight, where two tabloid journalists happened to be sitting in a row ahead.

For the 14 years since her divorce Fergie has given a good impression of someone who has left such humiliation behind by becoming a media princess in the US. “I love Americans because they saved my life,” she has said.

A 1997 article in the New York Timesranked "the Fergmeister" with Coco Chanel, Madonna and the newspaper publisher Katherine Graham in terms of her "financial wizardry" and accomplishment at reconstructing herself as an entrepreneur. "Sarah Ferguson," the article said, "has become, one might argue, a powerful role model for lone mothers everywhere – a heroic survivor." She had demonstrated that "she was not just some calculating jet-setter scavenging for a few lines of free press".

That positive impression was destroyed last week when Fergie was seen simultaneously boasting and grovelling in a secretly filmed tabloid sting in which a chequebook journalist dressed as a sheikh convinced her that he was willing to give her £500,000 (€600,000) in exchange for being introduced to her ex- husband, who happens to be a British trade envoy.

In the cringe-making video of the encounter you see a tired-looking middle-aged woman so desperate to get her hands on money that she actually beckons it towards her with her fingers, trying to parlay her royal connections into cold hard cash. She sounds nearly incoherent, though maybe that’s just the sound quality.

“I’m a complete aristocrat,” she boasts to the undercover journalist. “Love that, don’t you? I love it. It’s tremendously fabulous.” Then she pleads for generosity. “Do you understand that I absolutely have not a pot to piss in?” She shows a sense of entitlement as she calls her ex “the prince of England” and brags about her access to him.

In one of her many US-published self-help books Ferguson writes: “When you lie down with a wolf, you must count yourself lucky to come out with your jugular intact.”

She must be wishing she’d heeded her own advice, but whether she is about to bleed out in media terms is unclear. Ferguson is certainly not the first royal woman to have had to beg and connive to keep her lifestyle after falling out of favour with a monarch who happens to be a parent-in-law.

She has said that she wasn’t royal material. “I like to be chaotic and crazy and eccentric and a social entrepreneur. This is who I am and I like it, and I’m not going to change. I’m just me.”

Fergie might want to think about the wisdom of that philosophy. She has redeemed herself before, and could do it again. In the US the reaction to Fergie’s latest fall has been somewhat sympathetic, because the royals had given her a paltry £15,000 (€18,000) per year to live on – a point that both Simon Cowell and Max Clifford gallantly stressed when interviewed on the matter. And offering money to lobbyists in exchange for influence is a legitimate way of life in the US.

Fergie, who admits to having “overspending disease”, is as adept at amassing cash as she is at spending it. After her divorce she paid back a £4 million (€4.8 million) debt to a British bank, then built up a new fortune. Americans love a riches-to-rags redemption story almost as much as a rags-to-riches one.

That’s why WeightWatchers took her on as a $2 million-a-year “ambassador” ($2 million! – at today’s rates that would be €1.6 million). For a while it went slimmingly, with Fergie reducing her hips and bulging her bank balance, until her hips started to bulge again as well.

She found work as an inspirational speaker, charging €65,000 per appearance for her wisdom on issues such as self-esteem (of which she appears to have either too little or too much) and overcoming adversity. In dealing with the latter topic her family history came in useful: her late father, Maj Ronald Ferguson, was a serial womaniser caught by tabloids in 1988 in a massage parlour; her mother, who left the family when Fergie was 13, was decapitated in a car crash in Argentina; and her “best friend”, Diana, was killed in a car crash in Paris. Another of her topics is “the road to an authentic life”, a concept that jars with being caught begging in a fake sheikh’s apartment.

She’s not to be underestimated, however. In the past she even co-produced a film, The Young Victoria, that was well received critically, although it lost out at the box office. Famously, she “wrote” not only a series of Budgie the Helicopter books for children but also a serious adult picture book about Queen Victoria that she never read, confessing that she memorised the answers she’d be required to give when interviewed.

Some of her business plans have been daft – selling royal plates on the QVC shopping channel, operating a chain of Duchess of York nursing homes – but she has been extraordinarily resilient.

She claims to regret her "serious lapse in judgment" in apparently accepting a €40,000 down payment from the fake-sheikh reporter, but she has not hidden away. She has kept up with public appearances since the News of the Worldsting, even saying she wants to impress her daughters by being a contestant on the US TV show Dancing with the Stars, apparently believing she can tango her way out of this latest mess.

She even gave a breakfast talk at a US book fair this week to plug her Helping Hand series of children’s self-help books, which, ironically, aim to give advice on how to cope with a range of psychological issues. Her publisher, Frances Gilbert of Sterling Children’s Books, may or may not regret having stated: “The duchess has shown us that one can face life’s challenges with grace and strength. What better role model to share her wisdom about how to navigate the twists and turns of today’s family?”

Grace and strength are certainly qualities she needs now, though Americans do love character flaws. Before her latest blunder she was trying to pitch a reality show in which she would tour the US sorting out the lives of the less fortunate in a combination of Jim'll Fix Itand Changing Rooms.

The idea was rejected, but now that Sarah Ferguson's car-crash life has hit another speed bump you have to admit that a reality show featuring a faithful royal ex-husband and two princess daughters could make The Osbourneslook tame. And it certainly would be sweet revenge.

CV Sarah Ferguson

NameSarah Ferguson

Age50

OccupationSocial entrepreneur

Most likely to say"Andrew wouldn't know anything about it"

Least likely to say"The queen has invited me to Balmoral"