Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson revealed in a recent interview how she found herself with Princess Diana in the back of a police van during a wild bachelorette party in 1996.
Fergie married Queen Elizabeth II’s second son, Prince Andrew, in 1986 after forming a close friendship with Princess Diana when they were both single and living in London.
The royal sisters-in-law were known for pushing the boundaries of the established traditional form of the monarchy with both coming under fire from the institution and the media at various points in their lives.
Fergie and Andrew divorced in 1996, and despite this and his recent scandal-driven downfall, they maintain a deep affection for each other, continuing to live together at their Windsor Castle estate home, Royal Lodge.
Appearing on The Kelly Clarkson Show on Wednesday as part of a publicity drive for her new romantic novel, A Most Intriguing Ladythe ex-royal revealed a number of behind-palace-walls anecdotes, including an insight into the final days of Queen Elizabeth II and the truth behind her bachelorette hijinks with Diana.
“Is it true that you and Princess Di once dressed as policewomen…for a bachelorette party?” host Kelly Clarkson asked Fergie, who retained her Duchess of York title after her divorce until such a time as she remarries.
“That was my hen (bachelorette) party actually, 1986,” she responded. “It was extraordinary because we went to a nightclub—of course, you go to a nightclub with the Princess of Wales—the then-Princess of Wales—and I was just still Fergie. I wasn’t married yet, and we went into this nightclub and she was very good in her costume anyway.
“So, we sat down and the waiter came up to us and said, excuse me, this is a members club and it’s for fun and we don’t serve police officers here. Looking straight at us,” she said.
After leaving, the duchess told Clarkson that she and Diana were “arrested” over their choice of costume.
“We were arrested in a park by parks police, right?” she said, laughing. “So, we got in the back of the van and she had put her engagement ring around the other way and I put mine around the other way.
“We were sitting in there like this, and she just looked around and saw smoky bacon-flavored crisps (chips) and started taking them and eating them! And the policeman in the front said: ‘You can’t do that!'”
When asked why exactly they were stopped by the police, Fergie explained: “Because we were impersonating police officers!”
After she divorced Andrew in 1996, just a year before Diana’s death in a Paris car crash at the age of 36, Fergie wrote a tell-all memoir which is reported to have caused a rift between the once close friends over his intimate revelations.
Titled my storythe duchess told a version of the bachelorette story, adding that once the arresting officers realized it was Diana they had in the back of the police van they dropped the giggling pair at a Mayfair nightclub to continue their evening.
At the end of the night, she wrote, the pair headed back to Buckingham Palace and jokingly closed the palace gates as Andrew was driving his car into the forecourt.
“When he saw the shut gates, he properly took it as a sign that something was very wrong,” she said. “He flicked his car locks, rammed the Jaguar into reverse, and screeched out around the [Victoria memorial]. He thought he was being set up. It was about then that I wondered if we’d gone a bit too far.”
The next morning, the soon-to-be-married Fergie admitted what had happened to the queen, who she wrote found the story “reasonably amusing.”
Despite facing her own rounds of scandals over the years, including being filmed in a cash-for-access media sting in 2010 and various financial issues, Fergie maintains that she shared a special bond with the late queen.
Fergie and Andrew inherited the monarch’s beloved corgis after her death in September.
“One of the things she’d say now to me to come on this show,” Fergie told Clarkson on Wednesday, “is she’d say, ‘go on get out there, keep being yourself,’ that’s what she always used to say to me.'”
James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek‘s royal reporter based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.
Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson revealed in a recent interview how she found herself with Princess Diana in the back of a police van during a wild bachelorette party in 1996.
