The tussle for Royal Lodge was a major feature in the news throughout 2024 as King Charles tried to convince Prince Andrew to vacate the grace-and-favour residence.
However, the Duke of York – living there with his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson – has shown resilience and seems to have won the battle for now due to an enigmatic financial backer covering the expenses.
Fergie’s fondness for Royal Lodge is well known, dating back years when she abruptly left a celebratory lunch at a posh New York hotel—intended to honour her new business venture promoting Wedgwood china and Waterford crystal—after a prickly query.
Former Fleet Street Royal reporter Richard Mineards – a regular on US television discussions about the Royals and currently employed by the Montecito Journal, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s local paper – recalled the incident in his recent column, reports the Scottish Daily Express.
He recounted: “While other hacks were peppering her with inane questions, I asked Fergie, given her new contract, if she would at last be moving out of Royal Lodge, the Queen Mother’s former home near Windsor Castle, having said previously she couldn’t afford to run any of the homes offered her by her mother-in-law Queen Elizabeth.”
“She was clearly not amused by my query and walked out of the room.”
Mineards also noted that Lord Piers Wedgwood viewed the question as entirely justified in light of her lucrative agreement, rumoured to be around £500,000 per annum, inked back in 1999.
Later that same day, Mineards had been dispatched to cover a charitable event at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. It was there that the duchess was “glad handing everybody in the room – that is until she saw me and darted to the other side of the room”.
The event aimed to gather funds for Chances for Children, a charity co-founded by Fergie and James Ogilvy, Princess Alexandra’s son. Mineards remarked: “James noticed and asked me what had happened. I explained the lunchtime walkout and he rolled his eyes.”
This follows an incident where the 65-year old duchess made a swift exit from an interview with Australia’s 60 Minutes after she faced questions about the ‘cash for access’ allegations published in the News of the World as a result of a ‘fake sheikh’ sting in 2010.
The controversy led her to file a lawsuit; the case was eventually settled out of court. As Mineards waits for a golden opportunity to interview the high-profile Royal couple who moved to his area of southern California in 2020, he muses: “Such are the joys of covering the Royal Family..”
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