After spending much of her adult life indulging her lust for money and position on the back of her royal status, what now for Sarah Ferguson?
She is as disgraced as her ex-husband Andrew following the revelations in The Mail on Sunday, of emails that showed she continued her fawning association with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein even after telling the world she had cut ties with him.
Today she finds herself thrown into unforgiving fires of reputational hell.
The fun-loving Fergie, who continued to live with Andrew for decades in Royal Lodge after their divorce rent-free, giddily talking of herself as one half of ‘the world’s happiest divorced couple’, has been ruthlessly cut out by the King.
It is, of course, nothing more than this grasping woman deserves. A woman, who even after her divorce from Andrew in 1996, clung limpet-like to her Duchess of York title and exploited it to make money through endorsements, children’s books and romantic novels.
And let’s not forget the £800,000 she was paid for her poor-me autobiography in 2013 which, to be fair, was comparatively benign.
It has been reported that when Prince Andrew was first stripped of his Duke of York title weeks ago and Fergie of her Duchess title, she was ‘hysterical’.
If that was the case then, what is she like now?
And what can the future hold for her?
Her lucrative children’s book career is in tatters. Her career as a romantic novelist is also dead and buried. No respectable charity will touch her with a barge pole – the door to redemption through good works has been slammed in her face.
Even more worrying for freeloading Fergie is where she will live now that she and Andrew have been chucked out of Royal Lodge. While he’s been exiled to ‘private accommodation’ in Sandringham Estate paid for by the King, she’s been told to make her own living arrangements.
After such public ignominy, Fergie is facing life on her own.
Yes she has her daughters Beatrice and Eugenie to cling on to, but even they must be horrified having learnt the full extent of their mother’s continued close personal and financial association with Epstein.
Will either of them want Mum to come and live with them now she is so disgraced, and they have husbands and careers and children to think about? A granny flat extension? I doubt it.
Yet if there is one thing we know about Fergie is that she has an astonishing ability to reinvent herself.
And her reinvention is a prospect that must make the King quiver with apprehension, despite all he has done to exile her.
Because an unleashed Fergie could wreak carnage on the Royals. The terrifying truth is that she could choose to write another memoir, this time revealing everything and she would be paid millions for it.
After all she has had a front-row seat at the Royal family circus for decades. A bestie of Princess Diana, a confidante during the torture of Diana’s divorce. Oh the secrets she must hold that could be divulged in another Oprah interview.
A multi-million-pound Fergie Netflix show about the horrid Royals could make Harry & Meghan’s devastating six-part series, the highest rated show for the streamer in 2022, look like a walk in the park on a sunny day.
I fear the King’s very public humiliation of Fergie could come back to haunt Charles.
As much as it may choke him to provide her with the millions she expects and the home she feels is her due, it might be the only way to keep her silence.
The only way to save the monarchy from another full-frontal, tell-all assault.
