Her use of 'house' metaphors can make her sound like she's just devoured the self-help section of a bookstore, but few people have turned their lives around more effectively than Sarah, Duchess of York. Róisín Ingle meets the figure-of-fun turned fat fighter, the princess turned charity queen, the zero-turned hero
Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, charity patron and president of Weight Watchers, is sitting in a room in the RTÉ radio centre talking about her house. She is, she confides in that distinctive Sloane accent, the architect of her own home. She always makes it her business to spring clean her house.
She speaks about the layers of protective padding which over the years she put up around "the house". She says the padding was her method of keeping people out of her house. She talks about learning, finally, to let people in to her house again. This being Fergie, of course she isn't talking about her house at all. She is talking about her body, and sometimes her heart.
A few Irish journalists have been granted 15 minutes each with her this morning. We've been made to sign a form agreeing not to talk about Diana. We can talk about her two children, Princess Beatrice (18) and Princess Eugenie (16), but not about her relationship with her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, who divorced her 10 years ago, a split which has proved to be one of the more amicable Windsor break-ups.
Signing away our right to rake over the juicier titbits of Ferguson's life isn't too much of a disappointment, as there isn't much left to be said. The most intriguing aspect of Sarah Ferguson isn't her royal life or the tawdry toe-sucking affair. What is fascinating is the social and personal transformation she has undergone; from tabloid hate-figure constantly ridiculed for not being as poised or as beautiful as her late sister-in-law, to respected children's author, charity queen and regular guest on CNN and Radio 4. From figure of fun to a svelte figure who wears show-stopping gowns to charity balls and gets invited to P Diddy's parties. From financially ropey Sloane Ranger to wealthy businesswoman. From Duchess of Pork to fat fighter. From zero to hero, as her friends in America, where she spends half her time these days, might say.
The duchess is in Dublin for the second annual Daisychain Ball. The Daisychain Foundation is run by the Quality and Choice Hotel chain and provides unsold bed nights to disabled children and their families who need a break. Frankie Whelehan, who founded the charity, managed to persuade the duchess to become a patron despite her having announced that she wasn't taking on any more charitable work. She already has her own charity, Children in Crisis, which builds schools in Sierra Leone, among other projects, and she decided that if she took on more work it wouldn't leave time for her own house cleaning.
"But what Daisychain does is so important that I decided to take on their house because they offer families a chance to clean up their own houses," she says. One minute into the 15-minute interview, and Ferguson is already sounding as though she has swallowed the entire self-help section of a bookstore. It takes only another minute to realise she is a thoroughly likeable, surprisingly down-to-earth character who wears her house, sorry her heart, on her sleeve.
I tell her she featured in an episode of the TV show, What Not to Wear, the night before we meet and she groans, anticipating a barbed fashion critique. In fact, the presenters were praising her style, which just shows how the public's perception of her has turned around. After the divorce, when she was in financial trouble and in the bad books with the royals, she famously said: "I had been exposed for what I truly was, worthless, unfit, a national disgrace."
Then, against all the odds, she managed to reinvent herself. So, how did she do it? "One of the first things I would say about that is that I hope no-one has to go through what I went through. I pray they don't," she says. "I pray they are able to look at themselves quickly enough to assess their behaviour. How do you determine when your behaviour is not the right behaviour? It's a very interesting question. I was sabotaging my life through food, through financial things, but I was unaware that I was doing it because I was fearful and didn't want to look at the other side of Sarah, the dark side. I just didn't want to look at it. But I didn't know that, and how do you get to know that? That's the question."
When was the turning point? "I think when you get to the bottom of the barrel and you sabotage yourself to such a degree that you have to wonder what is going on, why have you made such a mess." She sought help with issues of over-eating and over-spending, and then a family nurse introduced her to a woman in California. That first phone conversation with Anna was a turning point of sorts, she says
"Anna said ah, so how are you today, and I went fine, ya, I'm great. Everything is perfect. And she said well, I am not hanging up until you tell me the truth. I said why are you saying that and I started arguing with her until she said, you are not happy are you? I had told her I was fine. She made me see that FINE stands for Frustrated, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional and every time you say fine, you are clearly not. And actually it's probably that you are feeling unwell or you are worried about overspending or whatever it is." (Later I look up FINE and discover that it's an acronym used by members of the Overeaters Anonymous group.)
"This is a house," she says pointing at her famously svelte frame which this morning is draped in a smart black suit and a white shirt with ruffles. "You build your house around you. And my house was built from the age of 12 when I put padding around me and that padding was put there by food and it was a pretty house. A perfectly nice house, and people said she looks nice, but I never let anyone open the door and no-one was let into my house and that means my heart and I kept everyone away just saying that I was fine, fine, fine."
Bear with her, she's not finished with this house analogy. "Everyone thought, good old Fergie; she is funny; she is great; everybody loves her. I bought my friends. I kept them away by being overly generous. I didn't want to let them in. Now it's different. I've learnt how to open the doors and now when anyone who works with me or is close to me says they are fine, I say 'no you're not'."
I can't help thinking it must be a royal pain in the behind working for Sarah Ferguson, or being one of her children, if you can't even say you are fine without getting the third degree. As if reading my mind, she says: "I mean, can you imagine how annoying that is? You can only imagine how annoying it is for my children. But actually they love it now, because I say, Please don't do what I did. Beatrice especially . . . She gets in a muddle like all teenagers do and, instead of ignoring that, I say, ah, you are falling into my trap, so what better mother can you be than if you are one who has made a lot of mistakes and can tell her children how to avoid them. Now when I say to them, don't do something, they say, Oh yes, that's right, because you've already done it."
Ferguson's relationship with her children has come in for criticism recently. She describes herself and her two daughters as a kind of familial "tripod" and boasts about how they do everything together. In August, she attended one of PDiddy's parties wearing a dress with a plunging neckline, and the tabloids were full of stories about how Fergie was living vicariously through her daughters. She is single and turned 48 last week. The unfair implication is that as she is older, female and unattached, she can't possibly have a life so she has to infiltrate the life of her daughters. Not surprisingly, this rankles.
"Beatrice, Eugenie and I don't like it. They really get angry because they know it's their choice to be with me. However I say to them, do you want me to say something about it, and they say, No Mum, wait until we want to say something," she says. "They were so angry about the coverage of the Puff Daddy party. It was Eugenie who begged me to go, so she was very annoyed. She said, Mummy, that's it. I am ringing up the radio. I am going to say it. I said let's wait . . . but one day my girls will have their say, one day they will answer the critics. So do we mind? Yes. Will we do something about it? No, not now. They will have their say later on."
Ferguson looks good. There's been talk of collagen implants and yes, she does look a little plumper around the mouth, but whatever about cosmetic enhancements, she's an attractive woman. But although she may have lost most of her padding - three stone of it - she admits that "dark Sarah" is never far away. "I wake up and there are times when I think oh, I don't want to do this . . . you just get sad," she says. "You look back and you have to deal with the darkness which comes up in fear or insecurity, and you don't know what to do with it so you are in pain, and maybe I use food to suffocate the pain. But you have to look at it, it is always with me and I must always look at it."
It's why she throws herself into charity work. "Because charity work is a way of me understanding how lucky I am. You know what? There are people all over the world who aren't as lucky as me and I keep being reminded of that. It makes me go, 'come on Sarah; pull yourself together and get out there'.
"Frankie Whelehan, who runs the hotel group behind the Daisychain Foundation helps families who have terrible diseases and viruses, and they won't live. So who is going to get out of bed sad when you hear that? You've got to get out and fight, and not let self-pity become the darkness that overrides you and then . . . um, don't eat."
This last dietary tip is so out of context that we both break into laughter. It prompts her to recall the Dalai Lama's advice when she asked him how to tackle the global obesity problem. "Tell them not to eat," he said.
The 15 minutes are up, and the PR woman is telling us we must finish.
"I'm going to shoot her," jokes Fergie. I ask her if she has any remaining ambitions or whether her 'house' - it must be catching - is completely in order now. "You know, I just want to end each day a better person. If I get to the end of the day having learnt something new then I've done well," she says.
• For more information on the Daisychain Foundation see www.daisychainfoundation.org
Sloane survivor
Born: October 15, 1959. Father is polo player, Major Ronald Ferguson (later to be Prince Charles's polo manager) and mother Susan Mary Wright.
1972: Her mother leaves her father for Argentinian polo player Hector Barrantes. Sarah and her sister Jane are raised by her father.
1978: Graduates from Queen's Secretarial College
1985: Invited to a house party at Windsor Castle to celebrate the Royal Ascot horse races. Her romance with Prince Andrew begins that week.
March 19th, 1986: Engagement to Prince Andrew announced
July 23rd 1986: Marries Prince Andrew in Westminster Abbey, amid 2,000 people and 30,000 flowers. The walk up the aisle takes four minutes, and a 17-foot train sweeps behind her.
1987: Creates Budgie the Little Helicopter after being inspired by the helicopter lessons she was taking.
August 8th, 1988: Birth of Princess Beatrice of York.
March 23rd, 1990: Birth of Princess Eugenie of York.
March 19th, 1992: Ferguson and Prince Andrew announce their separation, blaming the toll of his Navy commitments. They share custody of the children.
August 1992: Daily Mirror publishes photos of a topless Ferguson with her Texan financial adviser, John Bryan, by a pool in France.
May 1996: Divorces from Prince Andrew. Massive debts due to her extravagant lifestyle force her to remain living with the family in Sunningdale, Berkshire. The couple have remained friendly ever since. Publishes her best-selling autobiography, My Story.
May 1998: Makes a guest appearance, playing herself, in Friends.
September 1998: Her mother dies, aged 61, in a car accident in Argentina.
1999: Having previously hosted a short-lived talk show in the US, accepts a £400,000-a-year job as a London-based correspondent for NBC's breakfast programme Today. She also has a £1 million-a-year contract as the public face of slimming company Weight Watchers.
September, 2001: Chances for Children charity offices destroyed on 9/11. They were on the 101st floor of the World Trade Centre.