How Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson Went From Childhood Friends To Enemies

Two women in borrowed police uniforms once stormed a Mayfair nightclub to ambush a groom on the eve of his wedding. Wigs slipping, fake warrant cards in hand, they bluffed their way past the doormen and pounced. The groom answered to Prince Andrew. The pranksters answered to Diana, Princess of Wales, and Sarah Ferguson, soon Duchess of York, and the pair could barely stand up straight for laughing at their own nerve. A little over a decade later, neither woman would pick up the phone to the other, no matter who dialled first. When Diana died in a Paris underpass on the final night of August 1997, she and Sarah shared something bleak: roughly twelve months of complete silence. No letters. No telephone calls, no whispered reconciliations behind palace doors, nothing at all beyond the memory of a friendship that once looked unbreakable to everyone who watched it unfold. Sarah learnt of the crash the way most of the world did, through a late-night bulletin, and the grief that followed carried a splinter of guilt she would still be nursing decades on.