United Kingdom: How low can Fergie go?

The Duchess of York made a “gimme” motion with both hands as she prepared to pocket her $40,000 payoff, said Mazher Mahmood in the London News of the World. In the ritzy London apartment where she was meeting someone she believed to be a foreign businessman, Sarah Ferguson gloated over the piles of cash she was getting in exchange for access to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, Britain’s top international trade envoy. The cash was just a down payment on more than $700,000 that Fergie was demanding for her services. “You’ll get it back tenfold. I can open any door you want,” she boasted, as she relaxed on the sofa with a glass of wine. The prince, she confided, could not be bought, as he was “whiter than white” and never took money. But she claimed that her ex didn’t mind her profiting from his connections. “If you want to meet him in your business,” the 50-year-old duchess said, “look after me and he’ll look after you.”

As the world now knows, that “greedy” little performance was caught on film, said the Glasgow Daily Record in an editorial. The purported businessman was actually a News of the World reporter who was conducting a sting, and Fergie, it turned out, was easy pickings—and just when we thought that she had “finally redeemed herself.” Scandal followed the duchess during her royal marriage; there was that very public affair with the son of a Texas oilman, and who could forget those unfortunate photographs of her topless with a man sucking on her toes. Yet after her marriage ended, Fergie reinvented herself, both as a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers and as a children’s book author. But alas, “an inability to curb her reckless spending” left her with unpaid bills, and her greed proved stronger than her morals. “Her desperate, grasping performance on the surveillance camera,” as she rubbed her hands with delight over the money, “was an ugly sight.”

The royals should have expected something like this, said James Whitaker in the London Mirror. After the divorce, Prince Andrew was kind to his ex, but “neither he nor his family made anywhere near adequate financial provision for the duchess.” While Diana got a lump sum of $20 million when she divorced Prince Charles, Fergie reportedly was expected to make do with alimony of less than $25,000 a year. That’s a stingy sum for any middle-class woman. “For the mother of the sovereign’s granddaughters, it was truly mean and potential trouble—which is what they’ve now got.”

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Poor Fergie, said Libby Purves in the London Times. Before she married, she was just “an exuberant, impetuous, dim, kind-hearted girl” who was not meant for life in the public eye. Fame was hard on her. Her spunkiness came across as a lack of decorum, and she was memorably condemned as “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar” by the late Lord Charteris, private secretary to the queen. Left to fend for herself, she tried to cash in on her royal connections. The truly sad part is that she was so inept at it. “She is not evil or particularly greedy, but just, frankly, a bit of an idiot adrift in a world that is clever and laughs at her.” She deserves our pity.