EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Sarah Ferguson brands late Prince Philip ‘a wise man’ who could be ‘terrifying’

Sarah, Duchess of York, shocked with her recent claim that she became “even closer” to the late Queen Elizabeth because of her support for “poor Prince Andrew”.

Now, she has been giving her thoughts on Prince Philip.

Fergie, 63, says the late Duke of Edinburgh was a “wise” man who could be “scary” around her.

Philip carefully avoided the Duchess ever since a red-cover newspaper published surreptitiously taken photographs of her sunbathing topless in 1992. American financial manager John Bryan was sucking the Duchess’ toes at the time.

When asked if Philip was a wise man, she replies: ‘Very wise. You had to be at your best. If she asked for a silly comment, she was certainly told it was a silly comment.

Frightening. “Why do you ask me that? I do it every day. Why do you ask me that?” Yuck! Then you lose all your trust. “Did you drive today?” “Car or horse?” “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. Yeah.”‘

Speaking to chat show host Alan Carr on the latest episode of her Life’s A Beach podcast, the Duchess adds: “The Duke of Edinburgh used to say, ‘Remember Sarah, you have to be eligible but never elected.’ Cute. Yeah It resonates, right?

Although Fergie is not believed to have exchanged a word with her ex-father-in-law after her divorce from Prince Andrew in 1996, she remained on good terms with the queen. Sarah stayed at Balmoral several times, although she always left before Philip arrived.

“If you ask me what I’d be doing with the Queen right now, I’d be walking around looking at primroses and bluebells, and telling her all about the magnolia tree,” she adds.

While promoting her latest romance novel, the Duchess spoke at length about the late Queen. In an interview, she said that she would always be grateful to have had ‘even a minute of HM’s. [the Queen] time’.

She added of her ex-husband Prince Andrew, with whom she still lives at Royal Lodge, Windsor: “Because also, for the last three years, your poor son has been going through such a tumultuous time, and I think Her Majesty was relieved to being able to help her with it, so we became even closer, so she was more of a mother to me than my mother.

BBC star Justin Webb says there has been an unexpected silver lining to lifting the lid on his memoir about the brutal events at his childhood school. ‘My Radio 4 Today colleagues Mishal [Husain]nick [Robinson] and marta [Kearney] treat me with kid gloves now that they know the horrors of my past,’ the announcer laughs wryly.

In the book, The Gift Of A Radio, now available in paperback, he reveals that bullying was rampant at the Quaker boarding school he attended in the 1970s.

The Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, will miss Prime Minister’s Questions to attend Betty Boothroyd’s funeral tomorrow.

The date clash may not be entirely coincidental. Baroness Boothroyd was not a fan of PMQs taking place once a week on Wednesdays at noon.

She preferred the old arrangement of a shorter session on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and was not impressed when Tony Blair pushed for the change in 1997.

TV Anneka Reveals Her Inner Piglet

TV star Anneka Rice may have expected some tears from young children at the premiere of Winnie The Pooh: The New Stage Adaptation of the Musical, at London’s Riverside Studios, but the tears ended up coming from her.

“I can’t tell you how much it took me back to my childhood, to my children’s childhood,” he tells me. ‘Piglet just reaches for me. In fact, I cried as soon as Piglet took the stage.

Challenge star Anneka, 64, adds: “My favorite Piglet quote was: ‘He was so excited about being useful that he forgot to be afraid.’

“That’s something we all carry with us as adults.”

Earl Spencer doesn’t seem to be the only member of his family who is conspicuous by his absence at the wedding of his daughter, Lady Amelia.

Hello! The magazine has devoted 25 pages of this week’s issue to the celebrations in South Africa, but there is not a single mention of Lady Amelia’s brother Louis, who, as Viscount Althorp, is heir to the earldom and his Northamptonshire estate. , Althorp, where Princess Diana grew up.

Louis is said to have a better relationship with his historian father, Charles, than his sisters. Louis attended Lady Kitty’s wedding in 2021 while his father was away again. Friends say Princess Diana’s brother was not invited to the ceremony where Amelia, 30, exchanged vows with fitness trainer Greg Mallett, 33.

British playwright Lucy Prebble, writer of the hit American television drama Succession, tests her ideas on London taxi drivers.

“I’ll tell the story or idea to people who don’t work in the industry, like my family or taxi drivers, and then quietly watch what their eyes do,” says Prebble, 41, who worked on the TV series. Secret diary of a prostitute, starring Billie Piper.

She tells me, “If normal people have an arousal reaction and their eyes haven’t glazed over, I’m much more likely to.”

Sweeney Vice’s secret revealed

We’ve heard plenty of #MeToo experiences from women in showbiz, but is it time we heard from some men, too?

Claire Sweeney has admitted that she took method acting to an extreme while appearing onstage alongside Miami Vice star Don Johnson, 73, in a West End production of Guys And Dolls in 2007.

“We had to do this kissing scene, and you just kiss on stage,” says the 51-year-old former Brookside actress Sweeney. “On the last night of her career, I decided to stick my tongue in her.” Speaking on the White Wine Question Time podcast, Sweeney concedes: ‘Probably nowadays, I would get in trouble, but I went for the kill.

‘We walked offstage and he was like, ‘Hey, what was that?’