In the immediate aftermath of a major scandal, Princess Anne was left wanting to ‘throttle’ her former sister-in-law, Sarah Ferguson, a royal author has claimed
08:00, 23 Nov 2025Updated 08:08, 23 Nov 2025
Princess Anne was left wanting to “throttle” Sarah Ferguson, book claims(Image: Getty Images)
Princess Anne, famously dubbed the hardest working royal, has never been one to shy away from sharing how she really feels – and Sarah Ferguson has not been spared of that trait.
Whether it’s a candid thoughts on her brother King Charles’s plan to “slim down” the monarchy, or her incredibly laid back response to an abduction attempt, the Princess Royal has cemented herself in the affection of royal fans through her down-to-earth approach.
And it’s said that Fergie has faced the wrath of her former sister-in-law after getting caught up in a diastrous public scandal that rocked the monarchy. In an explosive biography of Sarah and Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, released earlier this year, author Andrew Lownie claimed that Anne got so furious with Fergie that she was left wanting to “throttle” her at the dinner table.
Sarah has been no stranger to scandal in the four decades she has lived in the public eye. But it was during the breakdown of her marriage to Andrew in the early 1990s that Fergie had her first taste of major controversy. All hell broke loose in August 1992 when Sarah was pictured having her toes sucked by her American ‘financial advisor’ John Bryan as they soaked up the sun in the South of France.
READ MORE: Andrew ‘abandoned’ by Sarah Ferguson with major similarity to Harry and MeghanREAD MORE: Sarah Ferguson thinks ‘all is not lost after Epstein scandal and plots new role’
Bryan and Sarah Ferguson(Image: Mirrorpix)
The reaction inside the House of Windsor was less than thrilled, to say the least. According to Lownie’s book, ‘Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York’, Anne was so frustrated by the photos ending up in the press, and Fergie’s reaction to them, that she was on the verge of “throttling” her sister-in-law.
After leaving the holiday with her boyfriend, Sarah allegedly travelled to Balmoral to be with Andrew and the other royals, and was there when the scandal broke. Sarah is claimed to have come down for breakfast to find her in-laws reading all about the affair with Bryan and seeing the wild pictures.
“She entered the breakfast room to find everyone reading the story and fled,” Lownie wrote. “One person, who was present, told the duchess’s biographer Chris Hutchins that the Princess Royal ‘came close to throttling’ Sarah, and at dinner told her what she thought of her: ‘There was not one voice raised against Anne. Prince Andrew’s anger melted into sadness and he buried himself in the special reports compiled for the Queen, which she did not hesitate to let him read.'”
Andrew and Fergie have both been stripped of their titles over their connection to Jeffrey Epstein(Image: POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
A servant who was at Balmoral during the dramatic saga claimed that Sarah “acted in the strangest way…You would have thought she was the person wronged, as if she had every right to go on holiday with another man, kiss and cuddle him, and the only person who had behaved wrongly were the photographer and the editors of the newspapers who had published the pictures.”
In 1992, Fergie and Andrew formally separated, though the couple wouldn’t officially divorce for a few more years. They have remained close, with Sarah still living with her ex-husband at Royal Lodge, their long-term home near Windsor Castle, for now.
However, with Andrew finally persuaded to give up his lease on the property, he is understood to be moving to Norfolk, where he has been offered a home on King Charles’s privately owned Sandringham Estate. Fergie has not been invited to join him on the vast 20,000-acre estate, with instead some reports speculating that she will be moving to Portugal, into the property her daughter Princess Eugenie owns there.
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