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Why I Don't feel sorry for Sarah Ferguson

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Keith Ranville
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« on: May 24, 2010, 03:57:26 pm »


 
Sarah Ferguson has been caught in some egg-facedly embarrassing situations before, but there's no doubt that this weekend saw her biggest humiliation yet. In the course of a sting by the legendary News of the World muckraker, Mazher Mahmood, posing as a businessman, Ferguson was caught negotiating a £500,000 deal to provide access to Prince Andrew – unbeknown to the Prince himself. In a video of the sting, she is shown blinking excitedly at a downpayment of $40,000, arranged baldly before her on a table. And throughout the encounter, her stupidity is uppermost. "I'm a complete aristocrat," she apparently told the reporter. "Love that don't you? I love it. It's tremendously fabulous." She also divulged her financial troubles: "Do you understand that I absolutely have not a pot to **** in?" Perhaps most damning of all is the moment on film when she holds out her hand and beckons for that down payment, biting her bottom lip. She has clearly mastered the colloquial sign language for "gimme the money".

But beyond the grubbiness and greed, there's something genuinely sad about Fergie's downfall and desperation. Because, whisper it, some of us have always quite liked her, and her most attractive quality – her artlessness – has clearly helped lead her into this debacle. It's that quality that's behind some of her worst headlines, her worst failures, that has seen her become a pariah in the press. And the monstering is about to grow hairier claws.

Of course, on some level Fergie must be used to people hating her by now. It's a very long time since this major's daughter – the girl whose mother left her when she was 12, to move to Argentina – was described as "a breath of fresh air" among the royal family. This was in the early days of her relationship with Prince Andrew, when the couple were both in their mid-20s. Fergie's family was rich, but untitled, and she had chugged along that predictable upper-class track for young women, from boarding school, to secretarial college, to jobs in PR and publishing.

From the moment she appeared as Andrew's consort, Fergie was set up in uncomfortable contrast to Princess Diana. Where Diana was rake thin, Fergie was not. Where Diana was shy and quiet, Fergie was not. Diana had been chaste, and married at 20. Fergie had had boyfriends including the motor-racing entrepreneur Paddy McNally. The two women, who had known each other since the age of 14, may have been friends at first – memorably using their umbrellas to poke people's bottoms at Ascot – but they were depicted as opposites, with Diana the chic, elegant, serene one, and Fergie the rambunctious, gallumphing rabble-rouser. It was a comparison that encouraged us to identify with one woman or the other. I can't have been the only person to identify with the awkward, cheerful, inelegant one.

An incident recounted in her autobiography, My Story, seems to sum up Fergie's style. On her first ever visit to Sandringham, she accidentally kicked one of the resident corgis when curtseying to the Queen. "You would have thought the little yapper was bound for the Royal kennel in the sky," she wrote. Still, at this stage, she believed it "when they said I was a wonderful fresh, clean page for the royal family . . . like some Mary Poppins crossed with Cinderella. At 26-years-old, I was incredibly gullible and naive".

That gullibility has remained, and it's one of the qualities that has made Fergie so human. The woman who once described herself as "not a bad egg", has always seemed funny, game, excitable, enthusiastic, with a strong edge of silliness. She has repeatedly been compared to a labrador. But these qualities quickly caused her trouble within the royal household – and without. In 1987, when some of the more junior royals took part in the surreal spectacle that was It's A Royal Knockout, Fergie took to the field with gusto, bounding around like an optimistic schoolgirl whose team is 30-nil down in the last minute of a netball match. In a medieval bonnet and smock, as captain of the Blue Bandits, she yelled "Give us a B! Give us an L!" which, given this was It's A Royal Knockout, must have seemed the right sort of thing to do. But for royal commentators this was apparently the moment when she went from being acceptably unconventional to entirely unacceptable.

Her press became nastier and nastier; the Daily Mail eventually called her "the most reviled woman in Britain". And growing up in the 80s, this sort of coverage confused me. The Sarah Ferguson I saw bounding around on screen seemed loud, over the top, clumsy, but fun. Who wouldn't chafe against the restrictions of being a duchess? Who hasn't felt gawky in public? The knives really came out as she gained weight, and the level of the abuse always astounded me – in one notable example, a newspaper reported that 82% of their readers would rather sleep with a goat. As a girl, I remember looking at her picture in the paper, and the headline running above it, and feeling distinctly confused. Fergie looked like the women around me. She looked like my teachers, my mother's friends, the women I saw on the high road every day. And yet here she was being described as repulsive.

Fergie was never like other women in the public eye, whether they'd arrived there because they were upper class, or highly glamorous, or both. Her ****-ups were, in some ways, so average. She struggled with her weight, she struggled with postnatal depression and her marriage broke up. She was caught on camera, ****, having her toes sucked by "financial adviser" John Bryan, and everyone either pointed and laughed or expressed outrage about something that was hide-behind-your-hands embarrassing, but hardly more sordid than what most people likely get up to in private. And beyond this she retained an excellent relationship with her ex-husband and her daughters. Both Eugenie and Beatrice are effusive in their praise for her, and appear to be genuinely well adjusted, while Fergie has said that she and Andrew are the "happiest divorced couple in the world".

That's unlikely to be the case today, but the events exposed over the weekend are probably rooted at least partly in the divorce settlement that Fergie was awarded in 1996. It apparently included a lump sum which largely went on a trust fund for her girls, and maintenance payments of £15,000 a year.

Fergie was never going to be able to live on that last sum, and she has spent the past decade and a half trying to support herself. We all have to support ourselves. There's no reason we should feel sympathetic. But it is at least possible to see that it would be difficult for a woman of limited education, who has often seemed an outcast in her own country, to make the kind of money that life as mother of the fifth and sixth in line to the throne demands.

And so she finds herself in her current, indefensible mess. She's been living with Andrew in Royal Lodge, but has offered to move out. It's not clear where she'll go. And it's certainly not clear how she'll make a living. It's a horror entirely of her own making. But, even now, I can't help feeling just the tiniest bit sorry for her.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/24/feel-sorry-for-sarah-ferguson
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Keith Ranville
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« Reply #1 on: May 24, 2010, 04:00:13 pm »



British nonsense...
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