With the Duchess of York in trouble after a newspaper sting showed her accepting money for an introduction to her former husband, Prince Andrew, Shirley Tart looks back over Sarah Ferguson’s years in the public eye

Blog: When Sarah Ferguson married Prince Andrew I wrote that the smiling girl with the freckles and flaming red hair would bring a breath of fresh air to the royal family.

The couple had been dubbed Duke and Duchess of York by the Queen that very morning, we had been entertained by a raft of celebrity guests filing in for the ceremony – Billy Connolly et al – and it all felt very jolly.

As the happy pair left Westminster Abbey in an open carriage on that cheerful day, it seemed a new era had begun.

Well it had. And how!

All these years on, never mind fresh air, the former Sarah Ferguson regularly blows a gale into public life each time exposing what seems to be an extraordinary battle with herself .

Since that extra-marital toe sucking captured by a sneaky photographer in a bush, she has careered from fame and fortune to infamy and owing a fortune – at one point, about £5 million, it’s said.

And right now she’s facing debt court action.

A dalliance with the American slimming industry and trying to carve a new role as a children’s story teller – as I recall the only place I’ve seen her books is in a local pharmacy – came to little in her attempts to turn banking red to black.

Part of the reason it seems is her addiction to big time shopping and spending cash she hasn’t got hand over fist (she could have been in the last government).

But if these latest claims are true, and video coverage tells its own embarrassing story, it would seem that Andrew’s former wife was not only prepared to sell access to the Duke, felt to be valuable in the trade game, but was daft enough to be duped.

She has said she’s sorry about “her serious lapse of judgment”.

I think she means sorry about being snapped in action again, as it were. I’ll say she’s sorry. Any of us would be – sorry at being caught out.

While she labels him incorruptible and whiter than white, using her former husband’s trade ambassadorial role as a carrot to attempt to pull in half a million for herself, is arguably more seedy than toe sucking.

For goodness’ sake, even if the conning journalist really had been a businessman, it was hardly a moment the Duchess would have wanted recording.

While his dad, the irascible Prince Philip, has never forgiven the Duchess, her former husband has always been amazingly supportive and protective.

Who knows what tomorrow may bring in that direction?