The week that proved that Andrew and Fergie were made for each other

Telegraph

14 hours ago

September 1982 and the Falklands war has been fought and decisively won. The aircraft carrier HMS Invincible docks at Portsmouth to be greeted with a thunderous welcome from cheering crowds, overhead aircraft and a cacophony of salutes from vessels nearby.
On board, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II presents a red rose to each crew member – including a grinning, handsome Prince Andrew, once dismissed as a playboy, now a bona fide war hero after seeing active service.
The 22-year-old promptly places the stem between his teeth and keeps it there as he saunters down the gangway, waving his white navy hat. And just like that, the nation falls head over heels in love.
Gone – at least temporarily – is his pejorative 'Randy Andy' nickname. Second in line to the throne after his uptight elder brother Charles and widely acknowledged to be his mother's favourite, it is in carefree, charismatic Andrew, that the nation sees the future of the monarchy. Yes, really.
Forty-three years on, this might read like ancient history to some. But to understand his shameful fall from grace, his descent from fairytale prince to pariah and his astonishing, ineradicable bond to Sarah Ferguson – a venal, vulgar woman without a scintilla of self-awareness – we must remember just how giddily high his stock once was.
In truth, eyebrows were raised when Andrew and Sarah married in 1986. On his triumphant return from war, Andrew had become one of the most eligible bachelors in the world, able to indulge his appetite for beautiful women.
Yet, he ended up with jolly, galumphing Sarah Ferguson, whom he had known since childhood. She was the daughter of royal polo manager Major Ronald Ferguson and wayward high society darling Susan, who bolted to Argentina when Sarah was just 12 and then remarried.
What little girl wouldn't feel lost after that? Small wonder she sensed a saviour-cum-meal-ticket in Andrew. Nonetheless, it was hard to fathom what, precisely, drew them together; his bullishness, her Jilly Cooper-esque attitude to rumpy pumpy maybe? A shared sense of juvenile irreverence?
At dinner parties, he would make 'ghastly' jokes about whether or not the woman seated next to him was wearing knickers. She found fake dog poo pranks hilarious.
Certainly, the fact she openly adored him can't have done any harm; the one thing her pompous prince seemed to crave was deference, which ironically, has been the main casualty of his own appalling behaviour. For Sarah's part, her sense of worth was predicated on conspicuous consumption without heed of the consequences.
For all the headlines garnered by Andrew Lownie's new biography Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, there is little about the couple's complex divorced-but-still-happily-cohabiting relationship we didn't know or at least suspect already.
Is anyone really shocked that Andrew is, according to the book, prone to potty-mouthed scolding of staff or that Sarah imperiously insisted her butler clock on at 4.30am to ice the watercress? We already guessed they were quite hard work.
But it is the operatic scale of her extravagance and the Mariana-Trench-depths of his sleaziness that has left the nation slack-jawed with horror.
Andrew allegedly slept with over a dozen women in the first year of marriage. Sarah was no saint in that regard either, but far more notable is how she allegedly burned through cash to bolster her unhinged fantasy of royal grandeur; Lownie's book claims that she once spent £14,000 in a month at a London wine merchant and, on another occasion, £25,000 in an hour at Bloomingdales.
This, while the monarch herself kept warm with a two bar electric heater, stored the breakfast cereal in a Tupperware container – and was eventually called upon to clear a number of her former daughter-in-law's eye-watering debts.
Andrew and Sarah – who had two daughters, Beatrice, 37, and Eugenie, 35 – officially split in 1992 after paparazzi photographs revealed Sarah having her toes sucked by her 'financial advisor' John Bryant at a villa in the South of France.
I very much get the impression that Andrew's hand was forced; they both entertained lovers and led parallel lives. It was only when Sarah was caught in flagrante on camera that infidelity became an issue. They divorced in 1996 but continued to share their home, Sunninghill Park and she joined him when he later moved to Royal Lodge. Despite the questionable optics, they refused to be parted.
By 1995, according to Lownie, Sarah was more than £3.7m in debt. Desperately short of money, she exploited her royal connections to the nth degree – her frankly awful Budgie the Helicopter books were emblazoned with her Duchess of York title, she insisted on being paid for interviews, flogged hair straighteners on the QVC shopping channel and even became a spokesman for WeightWatchers.
Her spending continued unabated, according to Lownie. At one point, her retinue reportedly included a cook, driver, maid, butler, dresser, nanny, three secretaries, a personal assistant, a lady-in-waiting, two gardeners, a flower arranger, and a dog walker.
The press coined the soubriquet Her Royal Excess as she took five holidays in seven months and threw endless parties. Returning from New York after promoting her Budgie children's books, the Duchess had to pay thousands to bring back 51 extra pieces of baggage containing newly bought clothes and gifts.
Attempts to make her confront her finances were met with fury. 'She would throw an absolute screaming fit if staff even tried to show her a letter from the bank,' one friend told the author. 'She just doesn't want to know.'
She insisted on a groaning table of food, laid out like a medieval banquet, be prepared for herself and her daughters every night – and the leftovers thrown away in a display of theatrical wastefulness.
Then in 2010, she was caught on film in a tabloid sting operation offering to introduce her ex-husband to a purported billionaire for £500,000.
But this was overshadowed the next year when 'Airmiles Andy' was forced to stand down as a trade envoy for British business due to his predilection for private jets and helicopters rather than scheduled flights – and for his close links with unsavoury foreign dictators and businessmen.
The clincher was that he had maintained contact with the American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who had been jailed for 18 months in 2008 for soliciting a minor for prostitution.
In 2019, as Epstein was in jail awaiting trial on federal charges of sex trafficking of minors, Andrew agreed to a catastrophic BBC interview in which he proved to be too stupid or too entitled to express regret for his friendship with Epstein and failed to properly address accusations made by Virgina Giuffre that she was trafficked and forced to have sex with him on three occasions when she was 17.
His wild claims that he had acquired a medical condition that prevented him from sweating and citing Pizza Express in Woking as an alibi have since entered popular culture as shorthand for risible excuses no one could possibly believe.
Within days Andrew withdrew from all public duties, relinquishing 230 patronages and other positions. Giuffre went on to file a lawsuit and in 2022, Andrew settled for a sum of around £12m – some £2m of which is believed to have come from the late Queen – without admitting liability, whereupon he was stripped of all his military titles, royal patronages and use of HRH.
Yet, despite the egregious sex scandals on his side and the seedy cash-for-access revelations on hers, something kept and continues to keep Andrew and Sarah together. Codependence? Deep affection? Or is it something darker?
Entitled author Lownie has alluded to the fact that due to his position in the family, Andrew is party to a great many royal secrets but is unlikely to reveal them, lest it impact his daughters.
Sarah, however, is portrayed as more of a wildcard when it comes to private and confidential matters.
'He's told them all to Fergie... which is why the family are keen to keep her on side.'
In Entitled, Lownie exposes some of Sarah's absolutely delusional crushes post-divorce. They make for toe-curling reading: Kevin Costner, George Clooney, John F Kennedy Jr, whom she refers to as Number Nine to denote his place in her childish wishlist.
'It's incredibly real to her, like a schoolgirl crush… She spends hours talking about him,' a close confidante observes. 'The fact that she's never even met him doesn't seem to matter at all.'
At one point, she even flies 1,500 miles to see the golfer Tiger Woods, with whom she is also smitten, vowing to 'follow him around the course for a bit and see how I get on'. Of course, they don't end up together – but, bizarrely a firm friendship emerges nonetheless.
It would be easy but wrong to dismiss her mismanagement of money as a foible. It's one thing to run up a huge tab at Harrods – more fool them – or walk out of luxury hotels without settling the bill, but what about her refusal to pay the local newsagent, her loyal chauffeur, the artist who painted the portrait she commissioned for Andrew's birthday? Real people get hurt.
But regardless of their behaviour, neither ex has ever had a bad word to say about the other. In an interview earlier this year, Sarah offered the anodyne explanation: 'Andrew and I call it divorced to each other, not from each other… Our bywords are communication, compromise and compassion.
'When I've gone through really bad times in the past, Andrew's always been there… He is exceptionally kind.'
By any standards, that's quite the accolade and one that vanishing few former wives would ever give. The Andrew she sees – or wants to see – is evidently very different to the swaggering, self-important braggart the rest of the world encounters.
In 2023, Sarah was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a single mastectomy. During reconstructive surgery, a mole was discovered to be malignant melanoma. During this time she recuperated at home with Andrew, whom she praised as an emotional bulwark.
'He supports me as much as I support him. He's supported me through thick and thin…' she told a newspaper. She also gushed on Good Morning America: 'We've been there for each other – when I've gone through really bad times… Andrew's always been there.'
Whatever the dynamic between them, they are clearly inseparable. Whether it's down to mutual understanding or mutually assured destruction, their singular relationship has weathered every scandal.
Those around may regard them as grotesque, but in the wake of almost every disaster they pointedly appear in public together in 'a show of unity'.
And they are united because in one another's eyes, they can literally do no wrong. They probably see that as a virtue. In truth, it's the very opposite.