There was a time when I thought it would be tricky for Meghan Markle – sorry, Sussex – to be upstaged as the most hideously embarrassing Royal but nope, silly me; I forgot that there’s still Fergie. Now the word is that she and Prince Andrew may be shut out from the Royal Family Christmas celebrations as punishment for the latest revelations about her – the Royal equivalent of being sent to the Gulag. She has also been dropped as patron of the children’s charity Julia’s House, who stated ‘it would be inappropriate for her to continue as a patron of the charity’ in the wake of recent reports.
And it’s all about her association with Jeffrey Epstein, the late billionaire paedophile.
This weekend it emerged that in 2011, after vehemently distancing herself in an interview with this paper from Epstein, by then convicted for sexual relations with minors, she got in touch with him again. In the interview in the Standard, she declared that accepting money from him - £15,000, to be precise – “was a gigantic error of judgment … I am so contrite I cannot say”. And then, a month later, she sent him this email:
“I know you feel hellaciously let down by me from what you were either told or read and I must humbly apologise to you and your heart for that. You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family. As you know, I did not, absolutely not, say the “P word” [paedophile] about you…... I saw all my children’s work disappearing. I didn’t want to hurt Andrew one more time.”.
Fergie is a casualty of feminism. She could have had a happy life as a county lady... but instead is paying the price for seeking a role beyond anything she could sustain on her own merits
Fergie now explains that the reason for her about-turn was that Jeffrey Epstein was threatening to sue her for defamation, and rather than telling him to get lost, she appealed to him. It’s bad, and it’s even worse because it comes just after Andrew Lownie’s devastating book about the sins of her and Prince Andrew. Now, in theory, Sarah Ferguson is the former wife of a non-working member of the Royal Family, so none of this should matter. But it does. Prince Andrew is the King’s younger brother and still has a claim on his family. But Fergie, after that long-ago divorce, is another matter. The rapprochement whereby the King re-admitted her to celebrations of Christmas and Easter with the family, may come to an abrupt end.
It's hard to know where to start when it comes to Fergie’s ill-judgment but the first error, obviously, was in allowing Epstein, a man whose disreputable character should have been evident from the start, to pay her debts. No… let’s go back a step. Her fundamental error was to have been so profligate in her spending that she was desperate to have him, or anyone else, pay off what she owed, because she certainly didn’t have the means to do so herself. So what happened was that the mother of the late Queen’s granddaughters put herself in the position of borrowing £15,000 from a man of evil repute. £15,000? To me, that’s not just venal, that’s cheapskate venality; she sold herself very cheap, did Fergie.
Obviously this isn’t in the same magnitude of error as Prince Andrew, who accepted Epstein’s hospitality, with all that entailed, but borrowing money from him was still to put herself in the power of a man who knew how to use that power. So, she condemned Epstein in the interview with this paper, then grovelled to him for that condemnation, and now explains that he was, in effect, blackmailing her with the threat of a defamation suit. But if it wasn’t for her profligate spending, she wouldn’t have been put in that position to begin with. Perhaps the late Queen should have bankrolled her and her former husband generously, on the grounds that her efforts to earn money herself appeared simply to entail exploiting her royal connections from everything from her association with WeightWatchers to her children’s books, because, God knows, it’s unlikely they would have been published without that connection.
For me, what’s so tragic about these messages from fourteen years ago, is that they show the apparent self-delusion that has been her most obvious characteristic since her divorce. She tells Epstein that “I was instructed to act with the utmost speed if I would have any chance of holding on to my career as a children’s book author and a children’s philanthropist”. But that work was itself delusional; as Andrew Lownie’s book makes clear, she is herself warm and empathetic with children, but her charity work was futile. And her position as children’s author was based primarily on the prominent description of the author as HRH The Duchess of York. Budgie the Helicopter is a perfectly harmless creation but it was never going to give Thomas the Tank Engine a run for his money.
These messages show the self-delusion that has been her most obvious characteristic since her divorce
And then there’s the suggestion that she herself had no responsibility in all this: “I was instructed to act…” she says, presumably by her lawyers. But you know what? It is the client who gives instructions to lawyers, not the other way round. There is, moreover, her unforgiveable prose style: Epstein must feel “hellaciously” let down, she says. She writes “from the truth of my heart”. Oh please.
Epstein was a terrible man who used his power over those he befriended; and it is chilling that so many men of intelligence and high position put themselves at his mercy. We now know that even a man as shrewd as Lord Mandelson did so. But Fergie didn’t just have her own flaky reputation to lose but by extension, that of the Royal Family. I remember one grandee saying to me at the time of her wedding that she was a frightful vulgarian; he was right but he didn’t know the half of it.
My own view is that Fergie is a casualty of feminism. In former times a woman of her class who was not terribly intellectual but was fun and energetic and warm hearted, could have had a happy life as a county lady, a bit like Camilla used to be, being horsey and doggy and genuinely philanthropic on a small scale. Alas, there isn’t much of a market for that amiable sort of character these days, and she is paying the price for seeking a role beyond anything she could sustain on her own merits.
The trouble for the Royal family is that, like it or not, she is still associated with it. And the reputational damage, added to the Meghan problem, may be more than its credibility can sustain.
Melanie McDonagh is a writer for The Standard.
