Sarah Ferguson: Debts, deceit and the downfall of a duchess

0:00How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. Coming up on the Sky News Daily, the lady and the trampled reputation. Sarah, Duchess of York, has been cast out for her links to Jeffrey Epstein, following her ex-husband Prince Andrew into exile.

0:43So, who is she? How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.

1:21Hi, everyone. Neil Patterson back with The Daily, where at the end of every week, we like to profile someone who's been in the news. This week is no exception. Hello. Here we are in Peru. Pacific Ocean. Pacific Ocean. Right there. Look, look, look. That is, of course, ex-wife of Prince Andrew and one-time friend of Geoffrey Epstein, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York. Hello from Austria, from Alto Asi. Very, very happy New Year to you all. She was once best known as a bit of a party girl, bubbly and vivacious. She really was a breath of fresh air in the rather musty House of Windsor. But she was cast out following her divorce and had to find ways of standing on her own two feet.

2:04Hi, it's very exciting. So it's competition time. You have to listen to this if you go on at Sarah Ferguson 15. So, something of a pioneer when it came to monetising royalty. But she did also throw herself into charity work. What I feel about Teenage Cancer Trust is that if there are seven young adults diagnosed on a daily basis in this country alone, then we've got to talk about it. And look, ultimately, it's that charitable work that's prompted today's podcast. Well, actually, let's be clear, it's the lack of it. She's been dumped as patron by a number of charities. After it emerged, she sent convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein an email of support.

2:46after not only his conviction, but also a very public condemnation of the billionaire. And just like her husband, she now faces exile and humiliation. So just who is Sarah Ferguson? Who better to ask than Andrew Lowney, author of Entitled, The Rise and Fall of the House of York. Andrew, look, clearly she married into royalty, but hers was already a privileged upbringing, wasn't it? I mean, she's a descendant indeed, I think, Charles II, She mixed in royal circles from a very early age. Her father was the polo manager to King Charles. But in some ways rather sad because her mother basically left the family when Sarah was 13 to go off with an Argentinian polo player and she was brought up by her father.

3:34And I think you can trace this strong sense of inferiority, her desire to please, her extravagance, her generosity, which comes from this desire to make friends. So when did Fergie and Prince Andrew first enter each other's orbit then? I mean, there's certainly a picture of them who were aged seven or eight at a polo match. You know, they went off to morning school and then they were brought together much later in 1985 when Diana, who was a friend of both of them, thought they would get on well and invited Sarah to come to Ascot. And basically she kind of pushed the relationship with Andrew. And actually it worked very well.

4:09Andrew courted her in a very traditional way with flowers and visits to the theatre and things. So in some ways, it was a great love story. The wedding was viewed by millions on television. I mean, there were very enthusiastic crowds watching them. It was a very happy occasion. And so in some ways, it's very poignant to see those scenes of them cupping their ears and asking the crowd if they should kiss. Welcomed by the public. Behind closed doors, though, were the royal family quite as welcoming to Fergie? no i think the royal family had their reservations she had a reputation for being a bit of a party girl there were concerns about her father there were concerns whether she was really in love with andrew in love with the royal family lots of questions around the marriage behind the scenes the queen thought that she couldn't stop talking and was slightly nervous about her new daughter in law but they they shared an interest in dogs horses and charades and that's always a good start in the royal family.

5:06The honeymoon was over pretty quickly, wasn't it? Not just with Andrew, but also the press. She certainly wasn't helped by the backlash over that infamous appearance on It's a Royal Knockout. For those who don't know, it was a sort of 80s version of the TV show Ninja Warrior. I mean, things did change. I would say within a year or two years of the marriage, we had It's a Royal Knockout. People, the press sort of turned on her, felt that she was getting fat, that she was looking for freebie holidays. and suddenly her sort of rather natural charm seemed a little vulgar. When you look at that kind of early period of her time within the royal family, she did take to it.

5:45She was certainly not overawed by the occasion, was she? Yeah, no, she was a very confident, charismatic figure and she loved, at least publicly, she loved the wedding. She, in fact, wrote later in an autobiography that she felt slightly uncomfortable that all the attention was focused on him rather than her as the bride. But, you know, she was a very confident person and I think she felt she could cope with this. I mean, she loved all the sort of pomp and ceremony and the attention. And in some ways, that was the problem. She got sort of swept up with it. And I think the problem was no one really held her to account.

6:23And as a result, you know, he wasn't held to account either for his actions. Give me some examples of that because Sarah Ferguson certainly gave the impression of being, as you say, incredibly charming, life and soul, interesting, bubbly, vivacious, but not necessarily someone who was willing to push the boundaries of what was acceptable within the royal family. You know, in some ways she was trying to push. She was a disruptor like Meghan Markle. I mean, she felt that, you know, the rules didn't apply to her. And that's where the tensions began with palace officials but um there were a whole series of of of problems i mean she uh began to take advantage of her position and she became less popular not just with the press but with the palace staff she would go off on on trips with charity she was involved in but but stay much longer than she was supposed to she would go and stay with people um she would have staff there and require them to be on hand and then at the last minute having cooked meals for her she would decided to go to a restaurant, for example.

7:25She would come back late at night from parties and expect the staff to rustle up a meal for her at midnight, the staff who'd been working since six in the morning. I suspect there was briefing against her, and suddenly the love relationship changed. Andrew was away on ships generally or in naval quarters. He wasn't around. When he came back at weekends, he was tired, he wanted to play golf or watch TV, and she wanted to party. So they actually, you know, were actually pretty incompatible characters. And the thing began to unravel. In 1992, she was caught with her lover, financial advisor, John Bryan, on holiday in the south of France.

8:08And he was sucking her toes. It was clear that, you know, this was a sexual relationship. Her children were there, and the Queen felt this just didn't look very good, and basically put down the three-line whip that the couple had to separate. Was this who she truly was, do you think? Or was this who the title and the husband permitted her to be? Was she always going to behave in such an objectionable, obnoxious manner? Or was it the situation that she found herself in that pushed her into becoming that character? I mean, her parents were very extravagantly on their means, were in debt, were i would quite say social climbers but they were they were networkers so she didn't have a great sort of background to come from so i suspect you know whether she'd married andrew or someone else the story wouldn't be that different but clearly she had huge opportunities with andrew in terms of who she met the lifestyle she could lead the sort of money she could earn and you know one could say the same about andrew if he had married someone else a more shall we say less extravagant, a slightly mousier figure, the situation in his life might have been different.

9:17There does seem to be a parallel between the two of them, Andrew and Fergie, in the sense that both seem to be attracted like moths to a flame, to people of influence, to people, frankly, of huge wealth. And that has caused them both such incredible problems. Yes, I think that's fair. You know, he wanted the jet set life and Sarah was exactly the same. She wanted the high life, and I think she thought when she married Andrew, she was going to get it. And when she found it wasn't quite like that, she began to be attracted to people who could provide it. You know, right from the very beginning, there were these people who, for most of us, we would run a mile from.

9:56But for Andrew and Fergie, were people that, you know, could be useful to them and could support them and give them free holidays and pay for flights and could generally make their life pretty comfortable. The relationship did come to an end and divorce followed. But she did get a relatively decent payoff from the royal family around about that time. Although, of course, she did lose the HRH status. She makes a big, big, big thing of the fact that she was badly treated. And she was by comparison with Diana. But Diana was a slightly different case. But the royal family did treat her well. I mean, she had, I think, 1.3 million in trust for the children.

10:33They bought a house. They paid off a lot of her bills. and so I think they were pretty annoyed when she began to play this line that she'd been badly treated. She could quite easily have had a pretty good lifestyle on the money that she'd gotten the divorce settlement but of course she wanted to live a rather more exalted life. She felt she had to make her own living and she did that very successfully and quite quickly. She was a spokesperson for Weight Watchers which she did very successfully and she did a good job. She did on the shopping channels promoting everything from cranberry juice to duchess biscuits and she could be basically paid to attend events she was a brand influencer before that really became a term uh you know she made she was on the books and was paid large sums of money for speeches she began to write children's books and uh which were well remunerated so you know there were millions coming in.

11:32But the problem was she had extensive staffs. She would not think twice about flying on Concorde. She travelled with huge amounts of excess luggage. She entertained very extravagantly. She had very expensive holidays. So there is a very strong sense of, shall we say, a lack of boundaries, which she shares, I have to say, with her ex-husband. And I think she's just used to getting away with bad behaviour, and so she continued. Not every couple that ends in divorce ends up falling out entirely. But I think many people have been surprised by the closeness of the relationship between Sarah and Andrew over the years.

12:11I mean, at one point they said that they were, I think this is from your book, divorced to each other, but not from each other. I mean, what's your understanding of the nature of that relationship? Well, I think if Andrew wasn't Prince Andrew, I'm not sure it would have survived in the same way. I mean, she hangs in limpet there because, of course, her whole raison d 'etre is based on being Duchess of York and being able to go to America. Her social status, commercial opportunities all come from being as closely linked as she can make it to the royal family. I think there's a genuine affection between the two of them.

12:43They're co-parented and now co-grandparents. So I think for a lot of people it's difficult to understand, but for those circles, you know, once you've had your heir and your spare, you can kind of do what you want, and that's sort of what happened here. But it does now feel that we've entered another chapter in the life of Sarah Ferguson with the publication of her email to Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein had given her large sums of money, And so she sort of did what she had to do in public, which was basically to distance herself, while at the same time trying to keep in with him. And of course, that didn't work.

13:18He was very upset by the way she behaved because he had been very generous to her. And so she was sort of rowing back to try and save that relationship. But it was very cynical because, of course, she presents herself as this great champion of women's charities, as a writer of children's books. And yet here she is happily consorting with a convicted paedophile. So she's a complete hypocrite. And I can understand why charities feel she's pretty toxic now, because these people are meant to represent these charities. They are meant to represent their values. and clearly these are not values that she has.

13:57The parallel between the behaviour of Andrew and Sarah, Andrew prioritising the access that Epstein gave him over the fact he should distance himself from a convicted paedophile. Sarah, according to you, looking for money, again over distancing herself from a convicted paedophile. I mean, time and again they have been offered the opportunity to make the right decision and they've just chosen the wrong one. I mean, clearly there are several points where they could have rescued their reputations, things could have been shut down. If you'd never given the Newsnight interview, would Virginia Giffrey have brought her case?

14:30Would all these things have emerged? But we can look back in hindsight and say, well, that was a crazy decision. But at the time, they're very impulsive, both of them. They don't think things through. And in some ways, it is slightly poetic justice as a hubris about this. You know, even talking to the contemporaries, certainly of his at school, they said this was an accident waiting to happen. But, you know, it is a sad story because, you know, they were popular and they had huge potential. They had huge opportunities and they blew it. Is that it then for Fergie, do you think? Is that the last that we will see of her in public life, at least?

15:10Yeah, well, no, I think never say never with Fergie. She's a great survivor and she will quietly do things under the radar. I mean, there are plenty of people, particularly in places like China and the Middle East, who are quite happy to associate with her still. I think for Andrew, his public life is going to be pretty limited. I think he's going to be smuggled into private family occasions. But, you know, there is always a residual affection for her as a survivor, as someone who has done some good work for charity, who is very charismatic. I don't think we've seen the last of Fergie. Given all of that, I mean, could this be the point at which she decides to tell all?

15:46Well, that's the great worry. And she's the one who's more likely to do it. But the way the royal family bring her to heel is to say, well, we can make life very difficult for your daughters. So just think about their futures and perhaps their future roles. So there is, I suspect, a Mexican standoff. So that must be the worry, that, you know, keep your friends close and your enemies close. After four years of research, after four years of looking into this woman, and who is to you Sarah Ferguson? Well, Sarah Ferguson is a woman of great charm, great ability, a woman who could do a lot of good, has a great empathetic feel for particularly deprived children, but is also someone who is greedy, needy, and not very, shall we say, wise in the decisions she makes.

16:33So, you know, very complex, very, I suspect, torn. So a wonderful subject for a biography, but not always perhaps the best bedfellow for other members of the royal family. Thanks, Andrew. In a statement at the weekend, a spokesman for the Duchess of York said this. The Duchess spoke of her regret about her association with Epstein many years ago, and as they have always been, her first thoughts are with his victims. Like many people, she was taken in by his lies. As soon as she was aware of the extent of the allegations against him, she not only cut off contact, but condemned him publicly, to the extent that he then threatened to sue her for defamation for associating him with paedophilia.

17:14She does not resile from anything she said then. The statement concludes, this email was sent in the context of advice the Duchess was given to try and assuage Epstein and his threats. And that is your lot for The Daily for this week. We are back Monday. Till then, do take care.

17:36How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.