JAN MOIR: As Sarah Ferguson co-presents This Morning, she has her strengths… but we now know that cooking carbonara on live TV isn’t one of them

Sarah, Duchess of York, guest edited and co-hosted a special edition of This Morning (ITV) on Monday. I want to be honest. I want to be nice. But when it comes to the Duchess in a live television situation, these two virtues are mutually and volcanically exclusive.

From 10am until the end of the show, 150 minutes later, the Ferg launching himself onto daytime television, like Icarus in reverse, was every bit as freaking awful as I had hoped.

Hard to pick a highlight between the word-mangling, corgi-wrangling-spaghetti cook-in and the interview with Sir Cliff Richard (Fergie: ‘You really are as humble and friendly as you’ve always been, how do you that?’ Sir Cliff: ‘It’s easy for me.’ But her brief performance as a panicked aunt who had to make a phone call was excellent.

“Actually, she’s been around quite a bit and she’s here to help,” said presenter Dermot O’Leary, making Fergie sound like a helpful pony with a dodgy past and the foaming bullets to match – and to be fair, that’s not a million miles from the truth.

“Ask me anything, call about love, relationships, difficult times,” the Duchess trembled. Careful screening of phone calls by ITV has undoubtedly prevented thugs swooping in to ask what to do when your ex-husband allegedly pays out £12million to a woman he claims he has never met, but many viewers lived in hope.

Selfie: Fergie takes a photo during the show with co-hosts Dermot O’Leary and Alison Hammond

Still, I felt grateful that the late Queen went to her grave without witnessing her appearance on national television to urge Suzanne from Newcastle to invest in a pair of fruity knickers to bring the sexy back into her marriage.

‘Yes. Get a nice, provocative pair of underwear from your dresser, blow-dry the hair and take it out for a treat,” said the Duchess and for a moment I thought she was talking about a corgi, and not Suzanne’s insensitive hubs.

Further advice included taking time off from work and visiting lots of ‘nice, nice restaurants and nice hotels’. It is clear that there is no cost of living crisis, work responsibilities or childcare issues in Fergieland.

“There must be more treats,” she kept repeating. ‘Treats. Treats. Treats.” She also revealed that another secret to a happy marriage was leaving a bunch of little notes in each other’s pockets. I wonder how many times she reached into the pocket of her favorite trench coat and found one that said, “Please get out of my house.”

Still, you have to laugh. Fergie has her good points and strengths like everyone else, but she’s a woman whose life is one long, torn ribbon of bad decisions and bad judgment – ​​she’s about the last person on earth you’d ask for advice on anything.

What now? After the break, the Duchess of Sussex tells viewers how to maintain a healthy relationship with your in-laws, while Genghis Khan shares his dinner tips and kebab recipes.

New role: Fergie takes charge of the show’s Spin To Win competition on Monday

Flanked closely by O’Leary and co-host Alison Hammond, the Duchess spent much of her time in the studio, on the sofa or sitting behind a large bowl of fruit, her eyes darting back and forth in panic.

In her green outfit and pixie boots she looked like Mad Mother Elf, a panto character in search of a plot, which also kind of sums up her life so far.

But she was good at that royal talk; the kind of banter that comes in handy when you’re opening a trade fair in Manchester on a wet Wednesday morning.

Fergie kept it super lame about the Windsors (“The King and Queen love their grandchildren and I love that”), but ventured an opinion – uh oh – on artificial intelligence (AI), which some see as the greatest threat to humanity since the neutron bomb. Not her.

“I don’t think everyone watching should be afraid of AI,” she said. “Maybe as we move forward it can be a useful tool.”

As the show itself progressed, it became clear that while the Duchess of York has had an interesting life, she seems to have learned little from the experience and nothing seems to have made an impression in the great void of her royal being. As guest editor, she chose the topics covered in the show, including rehoming dogs, 65 years of Sir Cliff Richard, making a classic carbonara and heart failure. On the healthcare front, the Duchess used her position as ambassador for the British Heart Foundation to highlight the importance of public defibrillators and their use.

‘Do you shave the chest first if it is quite hairy?’ she wondered chicly.

In the cooking section, she enticed Chef Marcus Bean to make “spaghetti carbonara, a personal favorite of mine” and surely one of the simplest dishes in the world? But after it was made, the Duchess of York was impressed.

“I think it’s really great that you showed me how to do it and this is the first time I’ve seen it happen,” she said, an incredible insight into the upstairs life of a 65-year-old woman who doesn’t . know how to cook spaghetti.

“It’s your show, I’m the fluff,” she said to Dermot and Alison at one point, which I think overplayed her hand a bit. Yet this was perhaps the most exciting episode of This Morning in the show’s history.