Prince Philip is said to have vowed never to be in the same room as Sarah Ferguson, his son Andrew’s ex-wife, after photos appeared in a newspaper in 1992 with Sarah topless and toes under a beloved from the south of France.
Gyles Brandreth, the official biographer of Philip whose book The final portrait will be published later this month, confirmed today the long-running rumor in the second long excerpt from his book.
Philip, he said, said “it was enough” after the photos appeared. He told Brandreth Fergie that he was “simply beyond pale” and decided to have nothing to do with her.
When the photos were first published, Sarah was sitting on the estate of the Queen’s Scottish country, Balmoral. Philip put his decision into action immediately, as Ferguson remembered Brandreth, saying, “It was ridiculous. As soon as I entered through one door, he would have fallen over the corgis to exit through the other. It was a lot of fun. Except, of course, it was not. ”
Although the queen continued to receive Fergie even after the separation and divorce from Prince Andrew, Philip made it clear that he had no desire to ever see her again.
Sarah cried to Brandreth, “Of course I want to see him. After all, I am the mother of his nieces. ”
Brandreth said that when she grew up with Prince Philip, she shrugged and said, “But the children come and stay,” adding, “I’m not vindictive, but I don’t see the point.”
He described Andrew and Sarah’s post-divorce arrangements, which saw them continue to share a house as “really bizarre”, adding: “I don’t pretend to understand it.”
Brandreth writes that Fergie and Philip held diametrically opposed views on “bottling your feelings,” which she thought was harmful.
Brandreth writes that when her daughters were children, she told them to sit in the middle of the large lot of their house, Sunninghill Park, and scream.
Brandreth wrote that Sarah then demonstrated, catching him by surprise as he let out a blood clotting scream.
He writes: “The prospect of meeting his ex-daughter-in-law screaming in the middle of Sunninghill Park could have been one of the reasons the Duke of Edinburgh decided to offer her a large berth after her separation from Prince Andrew. He regarded reluctance as a virtue and self-control as an admirable quality. ”
Philip has not sat in six parts since 2011 on the Oprah Winfrey network Finding Sarah, in which Fergie cried on screen with a TV psychiatrist. He told Brandreth that he was in favor of “self-awareness,” but against “endless introspection that seems so prevalent today.” As reported on Monday, he considered Harry and Meghan’s decision to do a similar interview to be “crazy.”
Fergie, Brandreth reports, tried to repair relations with Philip, but was constantly rejected.
For Philip’s 80th birthday, she sent him “a nice dinner service.” But even here, fate conspired against her, Brandreth writes: “It should have had 12 settings, but it arrived with 13: the ‘sample’ had been included in the set. With Sarah, somehow, something doesn’t always work out. ”
It is alleged that Philip’s oath to never be in the same room with Fergie was broken only when they both attended Prince Harry’s wedding at Windsor Castle in May 2018.