Fergie had a caring side but she was better at lying in pursuit of cash

Look here, I really had intended to give the Yorks a bit of a rest this week. Ditto Trump.  Maybe extemporise on favourite chutney recipes (it's the season after all) but no, you cannot stop the great tide of news which these days is more like a daily Ripley's Believe It or Not, that bumper annual of strange but true stories.

So, with apologies, we return to the Yorks and in particular to Fergie. She has now been dropped by seven charities in just 12 hours following Sunday's revelations that she lied (even more) about her "supreme friend" Epstein. But lying is what she does so well if it serves her purposes such as money making, advancement, publicity, or extraction from the latest hole.

So let's look at her history with the charity sector; in 1993 she started Children in Crisis which concentrated on kids and their mothers living in underprivileged conditions. All very laudable and the first meeting, to which I was invited, was at Buckingham Palace in a room on the first floor, accessed along a corridor which I had to negotiate almost by feel because it was so dark. The late Queen, rich beyond dreams, was so parsimonious that most of the 40-watt bulbs had been taken out. It reminded me of my first time at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport in the late 80s where almost all of the bulbs had been stolen.

I became a trustee and stuck around for seven years despite becoming increasingly concerned about the lack of control and vision. It was all about her, how she could be promoted as the new Mother Teresa now that she was separated from that nice Andrew. Two particularly smart women who tried to run things were reduced to despair and eventual departure and it was clear then that it was time for me to go. Some of her fundraising ideas were very good; she persuaded Eric Clapton to give a solo concert at the Albert Hall, just him, a guitar, a stool and an audience of 6,000. It raised a vast sum, by far the biggest for the charity. 

I was sad to leave because, like so many before and after me, I had seen her genuine caring side. Such as when she invited the young Igor Pavlovets to her daughter Beatrice's sixth birthday party. Igor, now 38, was born just after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster with badly stunted legs and no right arm, the result of his mother breathing in the poison of radiation. In 1990 after visiting Minsk, Kiev and the stricken reactor itself I had written extensively in the Express about the horror that hidden cloud had brought.

As a result, I became a trustee of Chernobyl Children's Lifeline, established by a terrier of a man called Victor Mizzi who had made his fortune in air travel by the age of 50 and wanted to give back. The charity brought Igor to England to foster parents after his birth parents could no longer look after him and, when Fergie read about him in a feature by Jane Warren she asked if we would bring him to the party. (Igor is now very happily married, they father of three healthy children and works as a painter and decorator in London. He is a delight.)  

It was done, I believe, for the best of reasons and that’s when our friendship began. It started to wane by 2000 and ended five years ago not long after Prince Andrew's Big Top show with Emily Maitlis left no one in any doubt that she was almost as bad as her thick ex. Along the way Children in Crisis went from its own crisis to crisis and in 2018 was folded into a truly brilliant charity, Street Child, founded and run by Tom Dannatt and where I really was proud to be a trustee. Imagine our shock when shortly after at the annual gala dinner, Fergie bounded onto the stage, daughters in tow, and announced that she was co-founder of Street Child. A lie so blatant that the audience of long-term supporters gasped.

Within 12 months she was gone. "He sacked me", she wailed when we met three years ago. In truth, Tom learned only too well that she always has to be the focus. And it worked — but in reverse. When the Standard gave Street Child a double page spread which featured her as the main picture, the appeal, usually a huge success for the charity, raised precisely nothing — not one penny. 

Along the way, it seems she has finally lost her loyal mouthpiece, the decent and long-suffering Kate Waddington, despite being owed £85,000 by her boss for work that had gone unpaid (£40,000 was eventually paid by a 'benefactor' in 2010). And despite Kate being godmother to Beatrice and Eugenie. 

As my friend Andrew Lownie said yesterday, there's sure to be more revelations and they can only further embarrass the monarchy. Personally, I don't think that would be a bad thing because its sense of God-given entitlement, its ridiculous command over the structure of the UK, and the sheer bloody obsequious way they expect to be treated, needs reform. It could start with sending the wretched Yorks into the wilderness, never to return. If Charles is too timid to do it, William must.

Meanwhile, I suspect we've seen nothing yet.

*****

Ans so to Trump. It's bad enough that he too lies every time he opens his mouth but now this dumb idiot, obsessed only with making money out of the role of the presidency, tells us that Paracetamol taken in pregnancy causes autism. And, standing by his side as he announces this is the one man who could possibly beat him in the Total Fuckwit stakes, that vaccine conspiracy jockey Robert Kennedy Junior.

What has America come to? At this rate it will become a Dictatorship of the Mad. If only Trump had followed his own advice during Covid and injected himself with bleach.

*****

So farewell then Dickie Bird, you were a proper national treasure, like cricket itself (not the crappy pyjama game stuff of the Blast and the Bash). We never learned what he thought of that truncated form of the greatest game but I think we can guess. He was Yorkshire's finest, as decent and honest as Timothy Taylor's Landlord and real fish and chips cooked in beef dripping. And as emotional as many a chap after a surfeit of Landlord. Here's hoping we are treated to a repeat of one of Parkinson's shows when he had his oldest chum and fellow Barnsley boy as a guest. A joy.   

*****

My clever friend Jim Kirby is on the line from the beautiful depths of rural Dorset: Starmer's Army, now armed with boomerangs.

*****

AND FINALLY

Corbyn and his angry friend Zarah Sultana are still looking for a name for their loony new party. How about Jezbollah. Or given the personnel, the Fruitcake Party.

ALAN FRAME

24 September 2025