Is there a way that Fergie can redeem herself? Amidst the continuing, damning headlines about the misadventures of the Andrew formerly known as Prince, it is easy to forget the similarly tragicomic travails of his ex-wife, Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson.
The news that one of her insipid children’s books, Flora and Fern: Kindness Along the Way, has been pulled from release might not bother book buyers or booksellers too much. But it has contributed to a sense that the former Duchess of York, once an affectionately indulged part of British public life, has now been contaminated by the Epstein-induced toxicity that has consumed her former husband.
There is, however, a way out for Fergie, and it is just possible that she will take it. Newspaper reports over the weekend suggested that she was mulling an American television interview, for which she would be paid a six-figure sum to participate.
In return, the never-knowingly-undersold ex-Duchess would spill the beans on everything, from her unconventional partnership with Andrew to the precise details of her (and their) relationship with Epstein. Fergie uncensored, unleashed and unbound: it could make jaw-dropping television, and could be a reputational car crash for her that would make the notorious Emily Maitlis Newsnight interview look like a cosy teatime chat between old friends.
Yet the idea of her blundering into a delicate situation like the proverbial bull in an (Emma Bridgewater) china shop is only one way in which the interview could pan out. If Fergie keeps her wits about her – and those who write her off as simply thick and greedy underestimate a savvy operator who has maintained a precarious situation by dint of maximising the opportunities she has created for herself – she could turn her fortunes around in impressive fashion.
Firstly, she should accept the large fee that she has been offered for the interview, and publicly announce that she will be donating it to charities for victims and survivors of sexual abuse. Secondly, she should show the contrition that Andrew so conspicuously failed to demonstrate on Newsnight; she is not a hard or cold person and tears come relatively naturally to her, and the spectacle of her weeping in solidarity with Virginia Giuffre and all of the other young women whose lives were ruined by association with Epstein could be a powerful one.
And lastly, she should come well-prepared for the interview and able to offer chapter and verse on everything that she knows about her ex-husband’s activities.
Her loyalty to a distinctly damaged figure may have been a symbol of her apparently sincere love for him, but his defenestration from public life has made him a pariah. If Fergie possesses a ruthless core underneath the golly-jolly-hockey-sticks exterior that she has presented in public life for decades now, she will know that it is not only in her interests to cut Andrew loose. It would also help her daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, who are narrowly clinging on to their own royal titles amidst increasing murmurings that they, too, have been tainted by association.
Most would consider it unfair that the cancer of Epstein’s criminality has spread into the lives of otherwise blameless young women, but the counter is that many other blameless young women ended up becoming trafficked sex slaves.
Fergie may well turn down the interview, suspecting it to be a velvet-lined trap, and resign herself to a life of loneliness and boredom. But if she wishes to have any kind of last act in the public eye associated with anything other than ridicule and contempt, she would be well advised to think twice about doing so, and to conduct herself with dignity, candour and grace: qualities that her ex-husband has singularly failed to demonstrate, but which it is not too late for her to show in extremis.
In any case, it beats writing another Budgie the Little Helicopter book.
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