Is Fergie’s killer aide plotting to spill her racy royal secrets?
A Saudi prince’s indecent proposal. Philip’s ‘fling’ with a renowned novelist . . .
Within weeks — maybe days — the Duchess of York’s former aide and confidante, who has served 14 years in jail for killing her boyfriend, will be free. Jane Andrews, who worked for Fergie for nearly eight years, has been recommended for parole.
i t should be a moment of r eli ef f or t he Duchess, who once adored Miss Andrews. instead, what happens next could turn into her worst nightmare.
With no home, no job and the prospect of an extremely chilly future as she tries to reintegrate into society, the murderous former royal aide, now 48, will, it is feared, be more than tempted to write her long-awaited memoirs. they could reveal, once and for all, the secrets in the Duchess’s life which have for so long evaded the public gaze.
Such a decision would be a calamity for Fergie, who is enjoying one of the less turbulent passages of her life.
having recovered from the scandal of trying to sell access to her former husband, the Duke of York, for £500,000 in 2010, she has kept an admirably low profile in Britain, while trying hard to raise it in America, where she was once a household name.
it has been a quiet time. A lucrative promotional campaign with U.S. Weight Watchers bit the dust five years ago, and attempts to relaunch herself as a children’s author left the American reading public underwhelmed. But recently Sarah York has, with typical chutzpah, clawed her way back.
She is currently fronting a sales campaign for the Fusion Xcelerator food blender — a weight-loss gadget — and has launched her own brand of tea with the sales tag ‘take tea With the Duchess’.
On the home front, her tenure at Royal Lodge, Windsor, with her ex-husband Prince Andrew seems rock-solid. indeed, many believe the couple could remarry once the principal hurdle to such a move — Fergie’s former father-in-law, Prince Philip — is no longer on the scene.
Worryingly, because of her spend-spend-spend history, the Duchess recently talked about taking on a London base in Belgravia (she is not welcome at Buckingham Palace, where her husband retains a suite of rooms). this luxury alone could relieve her of all her new-found cash — but that, she might argue, is her own risk.
And so, with her daughters happily making their way in the world, life looks rosy. As so often is the case, the public in time forgives a transgressing royal. And perhaps, at 55, Fergie has finally learnt that if you keep your head down, people will stop criticising you.
however, all this would be disrupted if Jane Andrews decides to spill the royal beans.
During her time working for the Duchess, she was her closest confidante. She knows her former employer’s secrets better than anyone — and there are many.
The two women parted on bad terms over a ‘ misunderstanding’ about the affections of one of Fergie’s boyfriends, the italian aristocrat Count Gaddo della Gherardesca. But although Fergie treated her generously after the breach, these days there is no love lost between the two women.
it was during Andrews’ time with Fergie, first as a dresser, later promoted to upmarket aide, that the Duchess plunged into her misguided affairs with two texan businessmen, Steve Wyatt and John Bryan. the latter spectacularly brought an end to the Yorks’ marriage i n 1992 after photographs of him sucking her Royal highness’s toes by a pool in the South of France were published. Jane Andrews witnessed it all.
She also watched the Yorks’ subsequent separation and divorce, and the traumatic effect of the loss of Fergie’s hRh status. Andrews lived for a time at Romenda Lodge, an unlovely house on Wentworth Golf Course where Fergie holed up with Bryan and her two daughters after the marriage split, and has a raft of untold tales to tell of the weird, almost psychedelic life the Duchess plunged into after her public disgrace.
She could tell the bizarre story of how Fergie imagined she could win an Olympic gold medal for showjumping without having even sat on horseback for years. For it was Jane Andrews who was asked to find a horse called heather Blaze that her boss had seen on television.
‘it’s my fate! i’ve found the horse! i’m going to ireland to buy it!’ squeaked the Duchess. the asking price was £400,000; her overdraft at the time was £2 million.
And who but Fergie could picture herself married to John F. Kennedy Jr, son of the assassinated U.S. President, even though she had never met him? American businessman Dr Allan Starkie, her benefactor and confidant, told some
of the story in his eye-popping memoir Fergie: Her Secret Life.
He wrote: ‘She told me: “I find him so attractive.” Only later did I discover her obsessive belief that she would one day marry John Kennedy and become First Lady of America.’ Fergie was still married to Prince Andrew at the time.
Who but the Duchess could imagine that an Arab prince would get rid of her multimillion-pound overdraft without wanting something in return? Yet Andrews learnt that her boss approached the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, with the cheeky idea that he would wipe out her seven-figure debt at Coutts, the royal bankers.
The prince invited her to dinner and was evidently happy to take care of the problem but was hoping for a night of love.
Fergie, who privately called the prince ‘Rubber Lips’, baulked after he planted a wet kiss on her mouth. Still, Prince Nayef played the gentleman, giving her £50,000 for his fleeting moment of pleasure.
And who but this poor deluded royal reject could fantasise that her husband, Prince Andrew, was Regent, with her sitting beside him on the throne as he presided over the State Opening of Parliament?
During the Jane Andrews years, Fergie lived in a dream of being First Lady of one country or another, on this occasion Britain. Of course, there i s no suggestion that she hoped for the demise of Prince Charles. Nevertheless, according to Dr Starkie she imagined what it might be like if Prince Andrew was appointed Regent, reigning as de f acto King until Prince William came of age, with her — separated but still married — by the Regent’s side.
What could be more blissful than to be Queen Fergie?
All these fantasies, and some even weirder, ran through the Duchess’s mind while at her shoulder stood Jane Andrews, witnessing everything.
Fergie was l ost f rom the real world, having disappeared into a life dominated and steered by a succession of psychics, on whom she lavished large sums of money she could not afford.
‘ Nothing her psychics t old Sarah ever came true,’ observed a f ri end bleakly. Andrews might know why they exerted such a hold on her employer.
But quite apart from the possibility of such revelations spilling out of the Duke and Duchess of York’s closet, there is just as big a risk of collateral damage to other members of the Royal Family, should Andrews put pen to paper.
For Fergie was, during her aide’s employment, thrilled by the whole royal scene and an avid collector of high- octane gossip.
For example, she used to tell the story — oft-repeated in royal circles — of Prince Philip’s supposed dalliance with the writer Daphne du Maurier on the eve of his marriage to the Queen ( then Princess Elizabeth).
The story goes that in the weeks l eading up to the wedding in November 1947, Philip was at a loose end, hanging around Buckingham Palace with nothing much to do. The Princess’s Comptroller, Sir Frederick Browning, suggested that Philip should go down to Cornwall for the weekend to stay at his home, Menabilly.
BROWNINg was married to du Maurier, who was well known for her ungovernable sex drive with both men and women. When the novelist came to meet the young prince off the train ‘an instant understanding arose between them’, according to the gossips.
The couple supposedly went to bed and stayed there the whole weekend. When it was time for Philip to return to London, he is said to have told du Maurier: ‘I don’t want to go. I want to stay here with you.’
The writer allegedly replied: ‘You will go. First, I am 14 years older than you. Second, I am married. Third, the whole country is waiting for you to bring our future Queen down the aisle. go and do your duty!’
Admirers of Prince Philip will surely dismiss such slurs as scurrilous tittletattle. But who knows what else the Duchess of York may have gleaned on the Royal Family’s patriarch, a man who detests her (he was once reported to have said that he ‘won’t have her in the house’).
Sarah herself has always been shrewd enough never to talk about the Royal Family in public (despite being trapped into indiscretions over the years by undercover Sunday red-top tabloid reporters), and for that good sense she is tolerated to this day on its outermost fringes.
But who knows what stories she repeated to Jane Andrews? In private, she can be an Olympicstandard sharer of indiscretions.
For example, Fergie will have learnt from Prince Andrew the many untold s t ori es about Prince Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles while he was still married to Diana.
She will have learnt about the Queen Mother’s £4 million overdraft — a debt that everyone laughed off, including the Queen, who joked: ‘Coutts would have folded long ago but for Mummy’s overdraft.’
Yet when Fergie ran up a similar debt with the same bank, she was savaged by critics for her spendthrift ways. She will not have forgiven the Queen Mother, and one has a way of collecting stories about one’s enemies.
Then, of course, there was her ‘frenemy’ Princess Diana. As their marriages sagged, the two women compared notes and formed an uneasy alliance, pledging that they would divorce in tandem — but each was supremely jealous of the other.
According to Fergie’s one-time lover John Bryan, she was always jealous of the superior Press coverage Diana received. Ironically, Prince Charles hoped despairingly that his wife would lighten up and ‘be more like Fergie’ — a remark hardly calculated to make the sisters-in-law grow closer.
When Fergie got to hear about this, she grilled her staff, asking them if she would have made a better wife for Charles. ‘Pretty soon, Sarah was convinced she was the one for Charles, and that she should have ended up as Queen of ****ing England,’ recalled Bryan despairingly.
As someone who could jealously ‘cry for two days’ after Diana made an appearance on television, the Duchess is hardly likely to have stored up precious memories of her, so we can expect Miss Andrews to have many unpublished stories that have the potential to damage Diana’s reputation and cause hurt to her sons William and Harry.
It is now nearly 14 years since Cleethorpes-born Jane Andrews went to jail for the murder of her former stockbroker lover. She beat him as he slept with a cricket bat, then stabbed him to death after he said he didn’t want to marry her.
Her life has been one of intense highs and equally crippling lows. Writing her memoirs may prove cathartic to her. But by signing a publisher’s contract, as it is widely expected she will, she would only be doing lasting damage to the muchbattered House of York.
It will be fascinating to see which choice she makes.