A Becky Sharp for our times, but without the brains

In an echo of the recent cash-for-influence trapping of MPs, the Duchess of York was filmed trying to sell access to her former husband, the Duke of York. The reporter posing as a rich businessman was not vetted; she asked for a confidentiality agreement, but carried on recklessly when he wouldn’t sign it, trustfully asking him to keep the deal secret even from her own aides.

So now, online across the world, the duchess can be heard burbling absurdly: “I never talk about money ever, but since we’ve got business hats on, I’m going to . . .”, gloating over bundles of notes, and negotiating half a million pounds for the Andrew introduction, “because really I think you two could really do some good business together”. She does remember herself enough to insist touchingly that her children’s father is “whiter than white” because he is “the Prince of England” and can’t earn, but “look after me and he’ll look after you”. Rather less touchingly, apparently in a flat lie, she claims that he is aware of the deal: “And as Andrew said . . . Andrew will play as long as it’s nothing to do with him.” She asks for “a percentage” of any phantom deal on top of her half-million, remembers to stipulate a bit for her charities, and claims that she often hears through her husband of “viable projects” and investments. Yeah, right.

There will be much hostile talk of greed and sanctimonious headshaking over the “damage” to Britain’s international trade reputation. But to me the main impression is sheer sadness at the progress through life of an exuberant, impetuous, dim, kind-hearted girl who in her 51st year should be safely stashed under some woodwormy beams in the shires, with an amiable lunkhead husband and a houseful of labradors, saddles and hilarious novelty ornaments, blamelessly raising money for the local hospice and cooking hearty lasagnes.
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* Archive blog: 100 years ago – panic about tabloid stings and the “odious violation” of privacy

Sarah Ferguson was just not born to be looked at and judged by millions of strangers, or to racket around the world like Becky Sharp: to put it kindly, she’s not very sharp at all. The News of the World undercover team — who say that the operation was launched because she was reputedly doing such deals with real businessmen — are not magical masters of the Dark Arts. The conversation as recorded is, to anybody who has done real business, implausibly vague, unbusinesslike and frankly unlikely. It reads like a dodgy bit of script from Howards’ Way or Footballers’ Wives. It is ludicrous on a professional level, and downright tragic when you remember that this is a real family with real feelings and two humiliated daughters.

I liked Sarah Ferguson when I met her years ago: she had the unreflective charm of a red setter puppy. I also — and this regularly destroys my credibility with sneerier friends — rather like the Duke of York. We sat on a committee together for a few years, just after his divorce, and I respected the kindly, decent way that he spoke of his already adulterous wife and the pressures she suffered in the Royal Family. Their continuing friendship and co-parenting has been honourable; which makes it all the more agonisingly sad that she should be driven to monetise the relationship.

I also feel that spiteful media did more than enough to wreck her mental balance in the first place. Before she had put a foot wrong maritally, Sarah Ferguson was the victim of insult and sneering: despite being a hearty, active black-run skier she was pilloried as “the Duchess of Pork”, hated for not being Diana. Her over-friendliness and well-meant lack of decorum were condemned as “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar” by the late Lord Charteris (which I always thought funny, since I met the good earl’s own son as a lad and he tried to sell me a crate of weird soap to sell to my friends. Vulgar?) But it was always open season on Fergie — her decision to leave a new baby briefly at home while she went to visit her naval husband was picked over by spiteful columnists, her taste in building Sunninghill tittered at.

After the divorce, in which she was not greedy, her efforts to earn money were derided and her charitable enterprises discounted. The irrational sanctification of the blonde, fragile, doomed Diana has made it somehow satisfyingly symmetrical to demonise the robust redhead who keeps bouncing back. Schadenfreude erupts every time she ends up with huge business debts or is castigated for mucking up a celebrity ball.

The duchess has repeatedly fallen prey to the modern celebrity delusion that big business is something anyone can do with just a famous name and a bit of pizzazz, and that once you’ve made one lucky deal with WeightWatchers or whoever, then more millions will just come automatically and for ever, because you are Midas. Sometimes, of course, that seems to work: women such as Jordan and the late Jade Goody made a great deal of money out of more or less nothing but exposure and hype. But real enduring business — the kind the duchess purported to dabble in during that mad taped conversation in Mayfair — is about research and care, proper accounting and risk assessment, knowing the value of what you have and whether it is safe to sell it. This apprentice wouldn’t last ten minutes with Alan Sugar.

Poor woman. 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. For that reason I find her behaviour a lot less disgusting, stupid and venal than that of Geoff Hoon, Stephen Byers and Patricia Hewitt demanding their £3,000-a-day fees in the recent Dispatches sting. They had been government ministers, they had degrees, they made laws. Sarah Ferguson — well, she just skied and promoted diet plans and wrote Budgie the Little Helicopter, and boasted to the undercover reporter: “I’m a complete aristocrat. Love that, don’t you? I love it. It’s tremendously fabulous.”