Despite numerous controversies and scandals, she has always found a way to make a comeback. Once again, just two weeks after being ousted from the royal family, the former Duchess of York is announcing her intentions to rehabilitate her tarnished image.

It was only a few weeks prior that King Charles was seen gallantly kissing her hand, as if she had never erred.

However, her 2011 email to Jeffrey Epstein, in which she referred to him as her “steadfast, generous, and supreme friend,” resurfaced, leading to her immediate removal from all her charitable affiliations and shunning by the family she had embarrassed.

In spite of the damaging association with Epstein, Sarah seems convinced that all is not lost; she believes she can regain public favor through a rebranding as a ‘global empowerment leader.’

Her plans include relocating to Portugal, authoring books on ‘confidence and resilience,’ embarking on lecture tours, and speaking at women’s leadership and wellness events. However, it remains unclear what credentials qualify her for this new role.

For 29 years, Sarah has lived rent-free at the Royal Lodge with her disgraced ex-husband, capitalizing on her title to amass—and spend—substantial sums from her royal connections.

Greedy, grabby, and grubby. That’s the verdict on the former Duchess of York who, according to someone who got too close to her, will ‘take everything – then bite your hand off to get the rings as well’. 

I have been following the career of Sarah Ferguson since before her 1992 marriage to Prince Andrew. Even back then, the future did not look promising. 

Divorced from her equally disgraced husband Andrew for the past 29 years, Sarah Ferguson continued to live rent-free and trade off her title, making – and spending – colossal amounts of cash milked from her royal associations 

To add insult to injury, reports that Fergie was ‘demanding’ the keys to William and Kate’s Adelaide Cottage in the aftermath of the Yorks’ spectacular fall from grace caused a stir 

She was on the rebound from a failed relationship with motor-racing entrepreneur Paddy McNally, a man 22 years her senior who refused to marry her. Andrew was on the rebound from an earlier relationship. 

But the world was in love with love at the time. Charles and Diana’s stardust marriage still looked almost magical, and having the future king’s younger brother follow him up the aisle seemed like the icing on the cake – but betrayal, lust, greed, and lies lay just ahead.

Barely three years into her marriage and while pregnant with her second daughter, Sarah embarked on a mad affair with Texan businessman Steve Wyatt. The couple met when, on an official trip to Houston, Texas, she stayed at the massive neo-classical mansion Wyatt’s parents owned. ‘Already seeking an exit from her marriage, she felt comfortable in these extravagant surroundings,’ wrote a former friend, Dr Allan Starkie.

She was attracted to the son of the house, but it was the sight of all that money – Wyatt’s stepfather was an oil tycoon, his mother colossally rich in her own right – all that property, all those possessions that entranced her. All could be had without having to toe the Buckingham Palace line and behave herself – something history shows she is regrettably incapable of.

‘It didn’t take long for Andrew to learn the truth about the affair,’ wrote Starkie in his memoir Fergie – Her Secret Life. ‘Leaving Harry’s Bar in Mayfair after a party, Sarah tripped and fell. The normally courteous Andrew walked resolutely on, leaving his seven-month pregnant wife to pick herself up and chase after him.’ 

A matter of weeks later, and a month-and-a-half after giving birth to Eugenie, Sarah flew with ‘the love of my life’ Wyatt, together with Beatrice and two royal detectives, to Morocco to resume their affair.

By the time he was obliged to return to America, Wyatt’s affair with Sarah had reached such a pitch of intensity that, according to Dr Starkie, ‘they had convinced each other that she should divorce her husband. This after less than four years of marriage and with a baby of just eight months.”

Wyatt had little money and Sarah had been bankrolling him but, as he left for the airport, Sarah invited his friend and cousin by marriage, John Bryan, to lunch. Just the two of them.

‘We had a couple of glasses of wine and were flirting madly, absolutely insanely,’ Bryan recalled later. ‘Just giggling, laughing, flirting.’

When she got back to the Palace she started calling Bryan from her bathtub. ‘You don’t call a man from the bathtub if you’re not ready to go to bed with him,’ boasted Bryan. 

Barely three years into her marriage and while pregnant with her second daughter, Sarah embarked on a mad affair with Texan Steve Wyatt (not pictured) 

The couple met when, on an official trip to Houston, Texas, she stayed at the massive neo-classical mansion Wyatt’s parents owned. Steve is seen here with Princess Beatrice

Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in the car after leaving Harry’s Bar in 1989

 Within days of Wyatt leaving for Texas, Sarah was in bed with Bryan in his Chelsea flat. ‘I couldn’t believe anyone could behave with such reckless abandon,’ was his flabbergasted response.

What wrecked Sarah’s marriage, apart from her promiscuity, was the publication of pictures of John Bryan sucking her toes by the side of a swimming pool. But her public disgrace had started earlier. Some 120 photographs of her holiday with Wyatt in Morocco were published, including the jobless Texan cuddling Princess Beatrice in a fatherly way.

The marriage to Andrew ended soon after with a transatlantic telephone call. Sarah was in the VIP suite at Miami airport when her husband told her that a decision had been made to end the marriage – it was not his decision.

‘Sarah’s hysterical behaviour in the first class compartment on the return flight – throwing bread rolls and peanuts, cutting eyeholes in an airsick bag and wearing it on her head while making telephone noises – indicates the depth of her shock,’ wrote Starkie.

Curiously Andrew, unaware of his wife’s new sex-partner, continued to share a bedroom with her at Sunninghill Park – the Windsor newbuild home that was a gift from the Queen. Bryan meanwhile, had made himself as Sarah’s business advisor, seeking to maximise profits from her children’s book Budgie the Helicopter.

When John Bryan came to stay at Sunninghill, he and Sarah would indulge in sex acts in Andrew’s study after the prince had gone to bed.

She didn’t care. ‘Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar,’ stormed the Queen’s former private secretary, Lord Charteris.

It was Sarah, perhaps, who gave her husband the idea of making money on the side by inviting mega-rich tycoons to Buckingham Palace – a trick he was still pulling nearly 30 years later.

As Fergie arrived at Heathrow there were stories of her shocking behaviour on her first class flight – throwing bread rolls and peanuts, cutting eyeholes in an airsick bag and wearing it on her head while making telephone noises

In the summer of 1990 at the behest of Steve Wyatt’s stepfather Oscar Wyatt, Sarah hosted a dinner party at Buckingham Palace for Dr Ramzi Salman, head of Iraq’s oil sales – Wyatt was looking for huge Iraqi investment in his US oilfields.

The scandal broke – but the idea of using the Palace and its associated family as a private money-making machine was established.

Sarah’s life since has been a succession of failed business ventures, unpaid debts and colossal overdrafts which Andrew’s recent biographer Andrew Lownie lists in considerable detail in his new book Entitled.

Every time she picks herself up, it seems, Sarah Ferguson slips on another banana skin. 

Her slim grip on the House of Windsor was in giving birth to Queen Elizabeth’s granddaughters Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. Once, that seemed a matter of huge importance – at birth, the girls were fifth and sixth in line to the throne.

But now the line of succession is secured through Prince William and his children, their significance has vastly diminished (they’re now 9th and 12th and heading south).

While Sarah faces an uncertain future, it was yesterday suggested that Fergie is preparing to flee the UK amid the scandal and relocate to Portugal, where her younger daughter Eugenie lives.

Eugenie, 35, and her husband Jack Brooksbank are said to have prepared a ‘grand suite’ in their oceanfront villa at CostaTerra Gold and Ocean Club for Fergie to settle down after she leaves the Royal Lodge. 

CHRISTOPHER WILSON is a royal author, historian and commentator