Follow Tom Sykes’ royal reporting at The Royalist on Substack, and get exclusive insight on everything going down behind the palace gates.
For the British royal family right now, the most dangerous book looming over them may not be another volume from California but a potential tell-all by Sarah Ferguson.
They would be unwise to assume it will never be written, given that the former Duchess of York has little to lose at this stage.
She finds herself fully cast out and “needs money.” Her ex-husband, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has been stripped of his royal titles, forced out of public life, and, after years of scandal over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and his settlement with Virginia Giuffre, now faces criminal allegations of misconduct in public office.
She has no official role and no access to public funds, and her charities have dropped her after the most recent “Epstein files” dump, which revealed her calling him her “supreme friend.”
At the same time, Ferguson’s taste for luxury has not dimmed. She reportedly spent nearly a month over the winter at Paracelsus Recovery in Switzerland, a hushed, ultra-discreet wellness clinic where a stay can cost as much as $17,000 a night.
Reports describe her bouncing between borrowed villas, Gulf boltholes and high-end retreats (including one in Donegal, Ireland) even as friends brief that she is effectively broke and “hard up, homeless and alone” after being forced, with her husband, to leave Royal Lodge.
It is exactly the combination of events that has always made Ferguson volatile: no money, expensive habits, and a sense that the palace has hung her out to dry.
Against that backdrop, publishing executives have already begun circling. Tabloid and celebrity outlets in Britain, Australia, and the United States have all reported that major houses have approached Ferguson about a warts-and-all memoir.
A tell-all Ferguson autobiography would be sensational.
She has already proved that she is willing to write things that upset the palace. Her 1996 book My Story, published in the wreckage of her marriage to Andrew, was one of the reasons Diana, Princess of Wales, stopped speaking to her in the year before her death; a jokey reference to borrowing Diana’s shoes and catching plantar warts was taken as a deep insult. (It was, after all, a more innocent time.)
And she also knows exactly how publishing works. Ferguson has written or co-written more than 60 titles, from children’s stories to lifestyle books, and has spent decades monetizing her author name in the United States and beyond.
She—and her agents—will therefore be acutely aware of the value of a no-holds-barred account from the mother of two princesses, ex-wife of the most disgraced Windsor, and confidante of Diana.
Long before they were royal sisters-in-law, she and Lady Diana Spencer moved in the same aristocratic circles.
Their mothers had known each other; as young women in London, Ferguson and Diana shared friends and lunches, re-establishing their bond in 1980 just as Diana’s life was about to change forever.
Genealogists will note that they are distant cousins, but far more important was the psychological kinship of two young women thrown into a rigid, patriarchal institution that never quite knew what to do with them.
The British tabloids loved to pit “Shy Di” against “Fabulous Fergie”—the fragile swan versus the loud, big-laugh redhead.
In reality, for much of the 1980s and early 1990s, they were each other’s closest confidantes, vacationing together with their children, sharing jokes about courtiers and comparing notes on life inside the gilded cage.
Ferguson therefore holds in her head not just the York story but a version of the Wales marriage, the pain of Diana’s bulimia, the rows, the affairs, and the toxic aftermath of her death. As Andrew’s wife, she watched William and Harry grow from little boys following their mother’s coffin into damaged, complicated men. She understood Harry’s rage at the institution long before he wrote Spare.
After she was frozen out of Prince William’s 2011 wedding to Catherine—Andrew and their daughters attended; she fled to Thailand to avoid watching it unfold on television—Ferguson admitted that the snub was “so difficult” and that she felt she was “not worthy” of an invite.
She was also not invited to King Charles’s coronation.
All of this has left a deep seam of humiliation and resentment. For years, she remained publicly loyal, calling Andrew a “giant of a principled man” and a “true and real prince” even as the world recoiled from his Newsnight interview and the details of the Giuffre lawsuit.
The sense now is that she is trying to put distance between Andrew and herself.
Then there are her daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie. They once represented the monarchy at events and enjoyed the trappings of royal status, but are now being kicked out of the inner circle by Prince William.
It is not hard to imagine Ferguson asking herself a blunt question: if Beatrice and Eugenie are to be stripped of their status and access anyway, what exactly does she have left to lose?
Of course, any serious memoir would force her to confront the most radioactive part of her own record: Epstein. Ferguson had admitted accepting money from him in 2011 to pay an employee, calling it a “gigantic error of judgment.”
But newly surfaced emails show her writing to him afterwards in gushing terms, despite publicly claiming she had cut off contact.
To date, there is no public evidence that she was involved in any criminal activity involving Epstein. Still, any book she writes would be the obvious place to explain exactly what she knew, when she knew it, and how she views that period now. Given the scale of the scandal and Andrew’s ongoing legal jeopardy, even partial answers would be explosive.
For publishers, the calculation is simple. Spare showed that the appetite for intimate royal disclosures is vast and global.
Industry estimates suggest Prince Harry’s deal with Penguin Random House was worth around $20 million in advances alone, with total earnings higher once sales are included.
One literary source told The Royalist they thought Ferguson could well get the same kind of money for a full Andrew tell-all. Whatever qualms some imprints might have about reputational blowback, there will always be others willing to pay for the scandal, the big story, the promise of secrets finally revealed on the record.
Palace optimists say that Ferguson has “ruled out” a tell-all, saying she is too legally exposed and too protective of her daughters to go nuclear.
They note that she is still, at some level, emotionally attached to Andrew and that any book that truly lays out what went on with Epstein could devastate him.
That may be true for now. But her situation is, shall we say, fluid; her finances uncertain and her safety net threadbare.
Living indefinitely in borrowed houses and five-star clinics is not a plan, and Ferguson has always reverted to the one thing she can sell when the money runs out: her story.
She has been humiliated by the family, cut out of its biggest moments, and now watches her daughters pay the price for decisions made by her and Andrew.
In that combination of hurt, need, and proximity lies real danger. If she ever decides that loyalty has been stretched too far—and that the advance on offer is big enough—the resulting book could drag decades of private conversations, compromises and cover-ups into the light.
In doing, it would make Spare look like the teddy bears’ picnic.
Want more royal gossip, scoops and scandal? Click through to follow all Tom Sykes’ reporting at The Royalist on Substack.
The post Desperate Sarah Ferguson Has Nothing to Lose. That Should Terrify the Royals appeared first on The Daily Beast.
