PLATELL: Why Fergie’s next move will be her biggest bombshell yet…,
Having been holed away for months since she was stripped of her title, home and income over the Epstein scandal, it was only a matter of time before the former Duchess of York had to surface to face the music.
And what better way to lure her out of hiding in her £2,000-a-night luxury Austrian retreat than the offer of a fat fee for a sit-down, tell-all TV interview?
One major American broadcaster is reported to be dangling a cheque for $1.7million (£1.25million) for what is certain to be an explosive ratings-winner.
To which I would cry: Don’t do it Fergie! Don’t sell yourself so short!
Her story’s worth millions more than that if she is prepared to bare her soul about her fall from grace – in particular, what she knew or didn’t know about the serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a man to whom she was once so close that she described him as ‘the brother she never had’ and once begged – jokingly, we can only assume – to ‘marry me’.
As we know from the huge successes of royal blockbusters by esteemed biographers such as the Daily Mail’s Robert Hardman and Andrew Lownie, whose incendiary biography of Prince Andrew, Entitled, was serialised by the Daily Mail, the public appetite for accounts from Palace insiders remains insatiable worldwide.
So just imagine the millions Fergie could earn if she wrote a no-holds-barred account of the decades she spent at the heart of the Royal Family.
After all, when she officially became a member of the Firm through her marriage to Andrew in July 1986, the late Queen is said to have considered her a ‘breath of fresh air’.
It was a mark of her closeness to the Queen and Prince Philip then that, instead of getting married in a tiara borrowed from the royal collection, she walked down the aisle in the York Tiara, a priceless diamond-and-platinum floral scroll piece commissioned from royal jeweller Garrard that was given to her by her in-laws as a wedding gift.
One American broadcaster is reportedly dangling a cheque for £1.25million for a sit-down tell-all TV interview with Sarah Ferguson
When she married Andrew in July 1986, the late Queen is said to have considered her a ‘breath of fresh air’
In the years that followed, the Queen was never anything but generous with her friendship and advice. And it was a friendship, according to Fergie, that endured until the Queen’s death, despite her many missteps.
While there were no witnesses to the Queen’s last words to Fergie before she died, the former duchess insists that her ex-mother-in-law told her: ‘Sarah, remember that yourself is good enough.’
She will also have a potentially devastating battery of tales to tell about her one-time bestie Princess Diana. They knew each other as teenagers and married into the Royal Family just five years apart, becoming confidantes before their relationship soured over what has gone down in history as the ‘wart anecdote’.
In her 1996 autobiography, My Story, Fergie claimed that she contracted ‘plantar warts’, better known as verrucas, from a pair of shoes she borrowed from Diana.
But that didn’t prevent her having a front-row seat on the bitter break-up of Charles and Diana’s marriage and the affair with Camilla Parker Bowles that rocked the monarchy.
Fergie and Camilla even mixed in the same circles. Her late father, Major Ronald Ferguson, acted as polo manager to the Duke of Edinburgh and the then Prince Charles, which meant he was deeply embedded in the same high-level hunting and equestrian set as the future queen.
The canny Fergie is surely savvy enough not to fall for an offer to do a TV special over which she would have limited control.
Following her ill-judged decision to encourage her ex-husband to give the now notorious Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019, she knows only too well the pitfalls that lie in wait for the unwary subject.
So what should she do? The alleged fee of £1.25million being offered to her by a US TV network will not be sufficient to keep her in the luxury to which she still believes herself to be entitled for more than a year – let alone buy what she would consider a home fit for a former duchess.
But if she were to put pen to paper and write a memoir, she might well command a huge advance. The admittedly more marketable Prince Harry is said to have made £20million from his memoir, Spare, after earning out his advance of £16million following record-breaking hardback sales.
She will also have a potentially devastating battery of tales to tell about her one-time bestie Princess Diana. Their relationship soured over the ‘wart anecdote’
Just imagine the millions Fergie could earn if she wrote a no-holds-barred account of the decades she spent at the heart of the Royal Family
While Fergie is unlikely to generate sales on quite such a massive scale, she is already a successful author of bodice rippers and if her revelations were bought by a major publisher, then snapped up by Netflix, the resulting dramatisation could make the streaming giant’s hugely successful series The Crown look tame in comparison.
Such an approach could not only make her millions but allow her to control the narrative.
One thing that might give her pause, however, is how going public with her dirty laundry might affect her daughters.
Unlike his sister Anne and brother Edward, Andrew insisted that his daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, were granted the title of princess.
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Royal observers have always believed that Fergie would keep her mouth shut in order to protect her daughters and their royal status, which includes the right to be addressed as ‘Your Royal Highness’.
Despite the many scrapes Fergie has got into over the years (before the final shame over Epstein) – from the ‘toe-sucking scandal’ to the ‘fake sheikh’ imbroglio – the relationship between mother and daughters was thought to have been unbreakable.
They proudly referred to themselves as ‘The Tripod’, with the daughters living with their separated parents at the vast Royal Lodge on the Windsor estate until they married.
But how does Fergie feel now that there are no reports of the girls offering financial or emotional support to their nomad mum, as she moves from one luxury resort to another, her exorbitant bills being picked up by heaven knows who or for how long.
Cut adrift at the age of 66 and divorced and homeless to boot, how desperate must she be? Not just for acceptance and respectability but for money?
Contemplating what future awaits her in what must be a fragile state of mind, she must be asking herself: Do I tell all?
Fergie is smart enough to know she’s a goose sitting on a golden egg worth an unimaginable fortune. I, for one, would be straight down to Waterstone’s on publication day to buy a copy of a book I recommend she calls Tiaras And Tears.
