Sarah Ferguson, no longer Duchess of York, is no spring chicken of a doe-eyed Cinderella, but she could turn out to have the ultimate fairy godmother of them all.
Well… godfather.
Formula One tycoon Paddy McNally died last week, and it is reported that he could have left his ex-girlfriend, the perennially on the edge of penury ex-royal, “a sizeable” chunk of his $1.1 billion fortune.
While her ex husband Andrew Mountbatten Windsor moulders away in gloomy Norfolk, hollering at non existent footmen to bring him more chocolate Bourbon biscuits, Fergie might be about to become the new darling of Zurich’s gnomic bankers and in the market for her own jet.
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I have some serious questions for whoever is in charge of karma.
This far-from-fairytale story goes like this.
Before an invitation to lunch at Windsor Castle changed the course of 25-year-old Fergie’s life in 1985, there was only one man for jolly hockey-sticks honking great Sloane, Fergs. Paddy McNally. A former journalist, he had seen the commercial nascence of F1, wanted in and managed to make himself vast amounts of money.
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Enter 23-year-old Fergie, freshly arrived in Verbier in Switzerland where McNally, aged 45, hired her as the nanny for his two young sons. (His wife, a Monte Carlo socialite named Anne Downing had died of cancer several years before.)
Her new home was McNally’s “immense”, as she later described it, eight-bedroom chalet known as ‘The Castle’, where he “hosted a continual round of parties and business dinners, all with superb wine”, according to Andrew Lownie’s Entitled.
Cue some Château Lafite-fuelled handsiness, a scenario that today would result in an open and shut sexual harassment case. But remember, this was the 80s and Fergie was a gal with glaring Daddy issues who couldn’t even spell Freud. Soon she and McNally became involved though he sounds less like your obvious romantic lead and more like a cautionary tale from a Jackie Collins novel.
“Paddy used to tell me I was fat and ugly and no one was interested in me, and I believed him,” Fergie has said, Lownie writes in Entitled. What a charmer.
The relationship, per Lownie, was “volatile” and McNally ‘openly slept with other women’. After the businessman flirted with a female visitor to the Castle, Fergie dumped a bucket of ice water over his head; on another occasion, he brought a woman home with him and gave his girlfriend two options – have a threesome or sleep in the spare room.
Still, Fergie was enamoured “I desperately wanted to marry him”, she said. McNally never even remotely got near bended knee.
Shockingly, this great romance foundered, and in 1985 Fergie’s old mucker Diana, Princess of Wales had a light bulb moment and wondered if her roistering red head friend might be a good fit for her recently single brother-in-law Andrew. Diana invited Fergie to an Ascot lunch, sparks flew and barely eight months later, Prince Philip was on the phone to the Archbishop of Canterbury and barking at him to dust off his mitre.
Obviously there would be no happily ever after for the Yorks, two people with the taste and good sense of Gold Coast spa dealers pitching a pyramid scheme to sell Betamax.
After her divorce, McNally remained a constant in Fergie’s life, the pair often photographed together and her regularly holidaying with daughters Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie at his Verbier compound. (They would both continue to enjoy luxe ski breaks thanks to McNally well into adulthood when he would lavish the girls with designer skiwear and expensive handbags.)
For decades, Fergie was “at the heart” of his “tight circle of friends”, a friend told the Daily Mail.
The Fergie story took a dramatic swerve in the last year which has seen her title, any remaining credibility and free-booting lifestyle in a royal property all take a hit. She found herself homeless and friendless thanks to the Epstein files’ revelations, and it was McNally who stepped into the breach to help out his ex, even though she had become the social equivalent of a cold sore.
It is widely reported that after her and Andrew’s eviction from the Royal Lodge in February, she fled to McNally’s Swiss property. (She was also photographed at an exclusive Austrian spa, costing thousands a night, a price tag she could hardly have afforded on her own.)
To the very end McNally was there for her and, as a source who knew them has told The Sun, “even in his final days, he allowed her safe sanctuary at his home in Verbier”.
Here’s where things go from touching to cha-ching.
McNally died last week at age 88, leaving behind a $1.1 billion fortune of assets including Sevenhampton Place, the $76 million former Wiltshire home of Ian Fleming, villa, Le Clos de Meaux in the South of France, three ski chalets in Verbier and a grouse moor in Scotland.
Now insiders think that McNally might have left Fergie a very juicy wodge, thus keeping the perennially cash-strapped pariah from the wolves.
One source told the Mail: “Of course he’s going to look after Fergie. They were in each other’s lives for longer than they were ever married to their spouses. He promised to always take care of her and he will.”
An associate told the paper that after McNally’s death, “The first question everyone thought was, “Is Paddy going to bail her out for good?” He was fiercely loyal to her throughout her scandals, and there were many.
“If he’s left her life-changing money, wouldn’t that be something?”
Another source suggested that “shrewd” McNally is unlikely to have left his former paramour simply a shedload of money.
“No one would be surprised if he’s left her a house and cash, but you can bet it’s in a private trust with a monthly income. He’d never give her a lump sum because he knows how easily she’d blow through it,” the source told the Mail.
“Paddy always looked after Sarah and at times over the past four decades she needed a lot of looking after. He never abandoned her in life”, a source who knew them both told the Sun.
The erstwhile duchess “could be set for a megabucks windfall”, the paper has reported.
Biographer Lownie, who is hard at work on a follow-up to his bombshell Entitled, told the Telegraph he “would not be surprised” if the former tycoon had taken care of Fergie in his will. “He was very, very good to her,” he said.
So how much might be Fergie in for? McNally’s son Sean died last year, leaving his other boy, Rollo, his only obvious heir.
Here are some cold, hard certainties though: She is globally despised, will never be allowed in the same postcode as an HRH, and the closest thing she will ever get to Buckingham Palace is if she starts investing in made-in-Guangzhou touristy snow globes. Her vomitus emails to a convicted sex offender whom she lauded as her “supreme friend” have made her a leprous public figure.
Money can buy you pretty much anything, but no amount of cash can rewrite history.
Daniela Elser is an editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with Australia’s leading media titles.
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