Sarah Ferguson opened up about how she truly felt when she visited Buckingham Palace for the first time, in a recently unearthed interview with Ruby Wax
In a recently-republished interview, Sarah Ferguson opened up about her genuine feelings regarding her marriage to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – known then as Prince Andrew. Speaking candidly from the comfort of her own home, Sarah prepares a pot of tea while discussing what it was like to become part of the Royal Family.
The conversation, recorded in 1994 for the Ruby Wax Meets series, has re-emerged after the American broadcaster shared it on her Ruby Wax YouTube Channel. At that point, Sarah’s public image remained clouded by the controversy surrounding her relationship with American financial manager John Bryan, who had been photographed kissing her feet while she sunbathed topless.
Sarah and Andrew completed their divorce proceedings in 1996, having previously confirmed their separation in 1992. Yet, during her heart-to-heart with Ruby, she continued to speak warmly about her former husband. When questioned about whether she “got what she always wanted” by marrying into royalty, Sarah explained she desired “the man,” rather than the accompanying privileges of royal life.
“Who cares about the furniture when you’ve got the man,” she remarked, “I’m not materialistic.” Entering Buckingham Palace for the first time, she explained, is an overwhelming experience.
“Adrenaline runs overtime, big time,” she remembered, before adding: “It’s absolutely terrifying.”
Andrew and Sarah never actually resided at the Palace, choosing instead to spend their married years at Sunninghill Park — a 665-acre estate near Ascot in Berkshire. Yet she still remembers the rigid rules at the Palace, extending even to how far the windows could be opened
She explained: “In summer, you long to open the windows right up, but you’re only allowed to open them so much, because you must keep the line of the windows at the same level.”
Looking back on her relationship with John Bryan, Sarah acknowledged: “I had the most appalling character judgement, and with John – he’s a very believable person. I didn’t know I was playing with fire.”
She admitted that for much of her life she was “completely unaware” of what was happening around her, saying that she looked back on her earlier behaviour and marvelled at how “silly” she had been.
Sarah attributed many of her previous errors to feelings of “abandonment.” Her parents divorced in 1974, when Sarah was 15, and a year later, her mother Susan departed the UK and moved to Argentina with her new husband, polo player Héctor Barrantes.
She described how, when she travelled to visit her mother in Argentina, she felt intimidated by Argentinian girls of her age, who all appeared to her to be tall, slim and attractive. At the age of 16, she began experimenting with slimming pills and injections. Her initial experience was a strange one, she recalls: “It was in this small village in the middle of South America – can you imagine how crazy I was to do that? – no prescription, nothing.”
She concedes that she has absolutely no idea what she was injected with, yet the slimming drug “changed her into another person.”
Whether or not this was a direct consequence of the medication, Sarah could not say with certainty. However, shortly afterwards, she recalled: “I got so angry with my mum, I nearly drew a knife on her.”
Despite abandoning the slimming treatments after just a few days, Sarah remained firmly convinced that the harmful side-effects of the drugs lingered with her for many years.
Combined with deep-rooted abandonment issues, the slimming treatments propelled her into a destructive downward spiral: “Because I had such self-loathing,” she told Ruby, “I wanted to prove to myself that I was this awful person.”
Ultimately, she revealed, it was her meeting and subsequent marriage to Andrew that proved her salvation. Yet even following the breakdown of that marriage, she still regarded him as her “best friend.”
Tactfully sidestepping the often-discussed question of whether the pair might one day remarry, she said: “I think we just take each day as it comes.”
Now, more than three decades after that intimate afternoon conversation, Sarah and Andrew find themselves more estranged than ever before, with the discredited former prince residing in a Norfolk farmhouse.
Meanwhile, his ex-wife is said to be travelling between health spas around the world, attempting to distance herself from the shame surrounding the former couple’s close friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — a friendship that has sparked the downfall of the Yorks.
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