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up for her to his mother’s courtiers. Andrew, sadly, was still in love with his wife, but, as
Sarah’s father had told his mistress, she had been in love with the royal family rather
than her husband. Now both ‘love affairs’ were cooling from Sarah’s point of view.
The Ferguson family connection was proving an embarrassment for the family; in
May 1988 newspapers broke the story of Major Ron’s visits to the Wigmore Club, a
gentlemen’s ‘massage’ parlour which the papers hinted was little more than a brothel.
Ferguson left the Guards Polo Club when his position as Deputy Chairman was not
renewed. Philip, President of the Club, always protective of Elizabeth, was not amused
by the scandal and refused the Major’s repeated attempts to see him, despite the
intercessions of the Duchess of York and the Prince of Wales. In November the following
year the Duchess had met the first of two Texans who were to bring about her downfall.
Steven Wyatt was the son of Lynn Sakowitz Wyatt, heiress to the Saks stores fortune, by
a disastrous first marriage to a man who killed his girlfriend while on an acid trip and
served time for manslaughter. His stepfather, Oscar Wyatt, was one of the richest and
the toughest men in Texas, while his mother, a Lauren Bacall lookalike, fashionably thin
and eternally young, was a star on the international jet-set circuit and a frequent
favoured guest at the Reagan White House. Princess Margaret was an occasional guest
at the Wyatts’ house, Allingham, and continued to be so even after the scandal which
involved Steven Wyatt and her niece-in-law. In Europe at Somerset Maugham’s former
Cap Ferrat villa, La Mauresque, the Wyatts used to entertain Prince Rainier and Princess
Grace of Monaco to barbecues with steaks flown in by private jet from Texas. There had
even been rumours that Lynn would have liked to succeed Grace as Princess of Monaco
after Grace died. Lynn had been hostess at her house in Houston when the Duchess of
York had been invited to a British Festival at the Houston Grand Opera and Steven
Wyatt had been there to help entertain the royal guest. Sarah afterwards flew to New
York in the Wyatts’ private plane, stayed at their expense at the Plaza Athenée and
dined with Steven at the fashionable restaurant Mortimer’s, in a group which included
the Queen Mother’s cousin, John Bowes-Lyon.
The friendship did not end there. Back in England Wyatt, now working for a
petroleum company associated with his stepfather’s oil interests, was with Sarah again
at a shooting-party in Yorkshire; later she introduced him to the unsuspecting Andrew.
After the birth of Princess Eugenie in March, the affair continued even more openly.
Sarah and her daughters spent a holiday with the Wyatts at Cap Ferrat, during which
the photographs that helped finally sink her marriage with Andrew were taken. Later
that summer the extent to which Sarah had become involved with Wyatt was blatantly
revealed one summer evening. Sarah, having refused an invitation to dinner with Lord
McAlpine, the construction millonaire, friend of Lady Thatcher and former Treasurer of
the Conservative Party and his wife, Romilly, at London’s top French restaurant, Le
Gavroche, was persuaded by Wyatt to give dinner in her second-floor Buckingham
Palace apartment to Dr Ramzi Sultan, an Iraqi oil-marketing dealer, whose country had
invaded Kuwait on 2 August and who as such was certainly persona non grata to the
British Government. Afterwards, she joined the McAlpines, bringing with her, uninvited,