Sarah Ferguson: A duchess unsuited to royalty

It’s not been an easy royal ride for the Duchess of York. As she launches her first romantic novel this week, Sean O’Grady charts the highs and lows of her remarkable life

The Duchess of York arrives at St George’s Chapel ahead of her daughter Eugenie’s wedding in October 2018 (Getty)

Yes, indeed, Fergie’s in the news again. This time, though, it isn’t the usual gruesome PR catastrophe, but because she’s got a rather sweet book out – literally a Mills & Boon historical novel. And yes, she’s trading on her name: it’s a sub-Jane Austen mash-up with a titian-haired, insecure, aristocratic heroine, and the clumsy self-references fall long and hard on the reader. But at least no members of the royal family were harmed in the production of Her Heart for a Compass. So there’s no toe-sucking, Jeffrey Epstein-style house parties where the Duke of York is definitely not present, or indeed much sex of any kind. It’s as chaste as a night out at the Pizza Express, Woking.

Fergie also, quite fairly, gives full credit to her “co-author” Marguerite Kaye, who has seen some 82 such novels pass through her word processor. Mills & Boon made a wise choice in commissioning Ms Kaye’s assistance. Some of the titles to be found within her prolific output suggest a certain flair for the genre, and it must have been clear that she would make an excellent collaborator for the duchess: Penniless Brides of Convenience; Matches Made in Scandal; The Undoing of Daisy Edwards, and, inevitably, Titanic.

Sometimes the prose lurches from the 1870s to the 2010s (“I am heartily sick of being the subject of press speculation”) but the historical context seems well researched. It’s still ever so twee, though. Here’s a clip: