Sarah Ferguson: one more sting in her tale

The former wife of Prince Andrew is once again in hot water, financially and otherwise, after being caught in a tabloid trap offering to grant access to the prince for £500,000. It's one more story in a life that has been an open book.

Kagan McLeod for The National

In the 2008 children's book Tea for Ruby the heroine receives an invitation to tea with the Queen. Ruby, a clumsy, flame-haired tomboy with a skill for upsetting trays and applecarts, "tries hard to practise princess-like manners," but "try as she might, can't be as well-mannered as she wishes she could."

The author of the illustrated tale, published in 2008, was Sarah Ferguson, Britain's Duchess of York, whose career as a writer, taken up through financial necessity after her divorce from Prince Andrew, has always been painfully autobiographical; the news this week that she has fallen foul of a tabloid newspaper sting is just another chapter in a life lived as an open book. As the London newspaper News of the World revealed in its "Cash for royal access sensation" last Sunday, the duchess had fallen into a trap set by Mazher Mahmood, the newspaper's self-styled "King of the Sting".

Posing as a wealthy businessman, he filmed her as she promised to arrange a meeting with her former husband, Prince Andrew. For £500,000, Prince Andrew, the UK's Representative for International Trade and Investment, would "open up doors ... look after me and he'll look after you". The duchess, who has since admitted the prince knew nothing of her plan, accepted a US$40,000 deposit and spoke candidly about her financial situation.

"I have not got a bean to my name," she said. "I left the royal family for freedom and in freedom it means I am bereft." It all began so differently; Sarah Ferguson was born into a world of privilege. Frequently portrayed as a "middle-class farmer's daughter" who stumbled into aristocratic circles through sheer luck, in fact she can trace her ancestry back to the royal houses of Stuart and Tudor. Her mother, Susan Wright, was a 1958 debutante; her father, Ronald Ferguson, the second son of an aunt by marriage of Queen Elizabeth.

After Eton and Sandhurst, he followed three generations of forebears into the Life Guards. In life outside the army, Ferguson immersed himself in the sport he loved, serving as deputy chairman of the Guards Polo Club and, from 1972 to 1993, as polo manager for the Prince of Wales. Sarah, his second daughter, first met Prince Andrew, just a few months her junior, as they played together as children in the background at high-society events.

Following her mother's example, and the classic path of an upper-class Englishwoman awaiting the arrival of a suitable match, Ferguson left school for secretarial college and a brief holding-pattern career in public relations and publishing. She fell in love with her Prince Charming when she and Andrew were reunited as adults at Royal Ascot in 1985. Engaged early the following year, the 25-year-old became Her Royal Highness The Duchess of York at Westminster Abbey on July 23, 1986.

It was a title she was to retain for just 10 years. By the time they married, Prince Andrew had been in the Royal Navy for seven years and had won admiration for serving as a helicopter pilot during the Falklands war. He insisted his mother pulled strings to ensure he wasn't given a safe desk job. Life as a navy wife proved something of a strain for Ferguson, who later said she saw her husband for as little as 40 days a year. She also struggled to adjust to life in the royal family - and in the public spotlight that played constantly upon her.

"I would also not have guessed that every dress I wore, every move I made or word I uttered would be scrutinised, analysed and sometimes criticised by people who barely knew me," she wrote in 2001. It was something she had in common with Diana, a friend she had known since her teens, but while the media's obsession with the young woman Prince Charles had married in 1981 bordered on worship, the scrutiny of Ferguson was frequently cruel.

The royal couple had two children, the princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, in 1988 and 1990, but in 1992 they separated amid tabloid gossip that the duchess was seeing other men in the absence of her husband. Then came what, until now, was the duchess's most mortifying moment. In August 1992, a few months after the royal couple had announced their separation, photographs appeared in the Daily Mirror of "Fergie in conference with her financial adviser", a Texan millionaire who for months had been insisting that they were "just good friends".

They were such good friends, in fact, that in one sneak shot taken of the pair poolside at a villa near St Tropez, John Bryan was captured in the act of sucking one of the royal toes. For the next few years, the duchess did what many of the freshly resingled do - she indulged herself with expensive clothes and fabulous holidays. In the process, she piled on the pounds and developed an impressive overdraft at Coutts, the posh-person's bank, rumoured to have been in the neighbourhood of £4 million.

When the royal couple finally divorced in 1996, she "hit rock bottom", she admitted in 2001. Walking away with an annual divorce settlement of just £15,000, she was "overweight, in debt and terribly unhappy". Busted down post-divorce to mere "Sarah, Duchess of York", she had become that most despised target of the class-conscious British media: a hard-up minor royal. Remarkably, she managed to turn the joke around.

Determined to haul herself out of debt, she swallowed her pride and traded up her weight gain and personal problems into a lucrative job as ambassador for Weight Watchers International. It was a defiant move in the spirit of her father, Major Ronald, who in 1988 had found his daughter's media spotlight drawn briefly, and destructively, to him. Her parents had separated in 1972, when she was 13; her mother left the Galloping Major for an Argentinian polo player. In 1988 a tabloid revealed that "The Galloping Major" was a keen patron of the Wigmore Club, described by the Daily Telegraph in his 2003 obituary as "a health club and massage parlour in London staffed by girls who, dressed in starched white 'medical' gowns, allegedly offered a la carte sexual services to members".

Ferguson's response was to ask the newspaper if he could have the cartoon it had used to illustrate the story. Despite the bravado, the episode cost him his job as deputy chairman of his beloved Guards Polo Club and, most painfully of all, estranged him from Prince Philip, the president of the club. It was a royal disapproval that his daughter, once described by the outspoken Prince Philip as "odd and pointless", would inherit.

After the divorce, Sarah began her rehabilitation in America, the land of televised redemption. "With style, with grace, the Duchess of York has survived scandals and divorce, beaten a weight problem, climbed back out of bankruptcy," said CNN's Larry King, introducing her in 2003. America, she said, had given her a second chance. "I said I was sorry for whatever I had done ... they have given me my life back, the American people."

In her 2003 book, What I Know Now: Lessons Learned the Hard Way, she revealed how she had been "racked with fears, doubts, inadequacies" when Sir Anthony O'Reilly, the chief executive of HJ Heinz, had offered her the Weight Watchers role in 1996. Nevertheless, "His outstretched hand of friendship came at a pivotal point in my life; he returned me to the land of the living and thus gave my children their Mummy back ... without that job, and that friendship, I dare not think what might have become of me."

She threw herself into work, trading on her aristocratic credentials to become the face of a range of commercial organisations from Wedgwood to Avon, launching herself on the celebrity speaking circuit and revitalising her career as an author, which had begun in 1989 with the first of a series of children's books based on the character Budgie the Little Helicopter. Now she embarked on a writing spree for Weight Watchers, producing five self-help books between 1998 and 2002 with such titles as Dining with the Duchess, Dieting with the Duchess and Reinventing Yourself. More children's books followed.

Equally enthusiastically, she embraced charity work, founding Children in Crisis in 1993 and supporting a number of organisations, including the American Cancer Society and acting as an ambassador for the Ronald McDonald House charities. Trouble, however, returned in 2008, the year her rehabilitation appeared complete, sealed with an invitation by the Queen to spend a weekend at Balmoral. There had even been talk of reconciliation with Andrew, with whom Sarah and the children continued to share Royal Lodge, a Georgian mansion in Windsor Great Park.

Her contract with Weight Watchers expired and, soon after, so did her arrangement with Wedgwood. The following year it emerged that a US company in which the Duchess had a 51 per cent interest had collapsed, leaving her with debts of US$1 million, and just last month the Daily Mail reported that in Britain "The Duchess of York faces financial ruin after being taken to the High Court for debts". It was, then, perhaps that desperation drove the duchess to throw caution to the wind and sup with the devil in a Belgravia dining club, despite her own reservations. At several points during her contacts with Mahmood she wondered aloud whether he might be an undercover reporter for the News of the World, but pressed ahead regardless.

Perhaps she will again find solace in America. Certainly, she earned cheers in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, the day the story appeared, when she refused to cancel her commitments and turned up at the Variety International gala to accept an award for her work with underprivileged children. And she will have an audience with the queen of television when she appears on The Oprah Winfrey Show next week, the classic path to redemption for celebrity sinners.

If nothing else, she has gained enough fresh material to justify a reissue of her 2003 self-help book What I Know Now: Lessons Learned the Hard Way. "I hadn't realised the ramifications of my actions," she told Larry King in 2003. "When you get out of bed in the morning, just remember that every single thing you do is going to be known by someone. So think of the consequences." If only she had learnt to take her own advice.