Sarah Ferguson is still in the wind. No one knows where she is, and the British press would rather pocket-watch the Duke and Duchess of Sussex from thousands of miles away than actually work some leads and figure out where the hell Sarah has been since her ex-husband’s arrest. Well, over the weekend, the Sun reported a completely bizarre piece of gossip. First, some backstory: in Queen Elizabeth II’s final years, she did not want to leave any dogs orphaned by her passing. She stopped breeding or buying corgis years beforehand, and her last dog died in 2020. Then Prince Philip passed away in 2021, so Prince Andrew thought it would be a good idea to “cheer up” his mother with a series of puppies. One puppy died very soon after arriving at Windsor Castle, so Andrew gave his mother two more puppies, Muick and Sandy. When QEII died in 2022, the two dogs were sent back to Andrew and Fergie at Royal Lodge, and Andrew currently has the dogs with him at Wood Farm at the Sandringham estate.

Well, according to the Sun, Sarah Ferguson “pitched” a television show to American producers where “the Queen’s dogs” would be cloned and the cloning process would be filmed or something. You have to understand, Sarah basically made those dogs into her whole raison d’etre after QEII’s passing. Sarah gave interview after interview about the dogs and how she believes that QEII communicates with her through the dogs. She was probably trying to monetize those dogs in some convoluted way, I’m sure. But I don’t really believe that she pitched a dog-cloning TV show, and her rep has already denied it. In any case, that Sun story became the catalyst for Tom Sykes to drop an exclusive about how the Prince and Princess of Wales felt about Sarah and those fakakta dogs.

Prince William and his wife, Catherine, the Princess of Wales, were left “appalled” after Sarah Ferguson claimed the Queen was communicating with her from beyond the grave through her Corgis, I can exclusively reveal.

Sarah took to telling friends and family, to William and Catherine’s intense irritation, that the Queen used the corgis to communicate with her from beyond the grave, and that she and the dogs could feel Elizabeth’s presence when she walked them to some of the late Queen’s favorite spots in Windsor Great Park, where she and Andrew lived in Royal Lodge, the 10-bedroom former home of the Queen Mother (another Corgi lover as the below pic shows).

William and Catherine, along with those who actually cared for and spent time with the Queen in her final months, such as her oldest friend and dresser, Angela Kelly, thought it was a bizarre and tasteless way for Sarah to boast, erroneously in their opinion, of her spiritual closeness to Elizabeth.

They also found it distasteful that Sarah pretended to friends that she had been “left” the dogs in the late sovereign’s will, when, in fact, they were simply returned to Andrew and Sarah who had given the Queen the dogs, Sandy and Muick, without consulting with other members of the family, in 2021.

The Queen had been an enthusiastic breeder and owner of Corgis and Dorgis (a Corgi /Daschund cross created after an unplanned pregnancy between one of her dogs and one of Princess Margaret’s Dachshunds) since her teenage years. However, like many conscientious pet owners, she did not want her pets to be orphaned after her death and she told friends at the time that her last dog would be the Dorgi, Vulcan, who died, in late 2020, during the Covid pandemic. Vulcan is thought not to have been directly descended from her first Corgi, Susan, given to her by her father George VI, when she was 18, but she had certainly bred Vulcan and several of his ancestors herself.

By the time Muick and then Sandy arrived in mid 2021, the Queen was already severely ill with bone cancer and increasingly reliant on a wheelchair behind closed doors. Less than a year after their arrival, in February 2022, her office announced that she was struggling with “episodic mobility problems.” She died in September 2022.

I am told she never walked the dogs. One friend told me: “They were an unhelpful and unasked for gift from her son. She took her responsibilities to dumb animals very seriously. She knew Charles and William didn’t like Corgis, and she made it very clear she did not want the dogs on her conscience. The sight of them being walked round Wood Farm by a footman is tragic, and it shows just how prescient she was.”

[From The Royalist Substack]

While it’s rare for me to take William and Kate’s side on any subject, I think they had every right to be irritated by the dog saga in QEII’s final year. It was extremely stupid and short-sighted for Andrew to give his dying mother PUPPIES in her final year-and-a-half. It’s even more appalling that Andrew and Fergie then tried to milk that association after QEII’s death. “She took her responsibilities to dumb animals very seriously” is WILD though! Now, all that being said, this is sort of a retcon about QEII’s final years. They’re trying to say that Charles, William and Kate spent a lot of time with QEII after Philip’s death, when that simply wasn’t true. The reason why Andrew got so much out of his mother was because he was the one visiting her constantly.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images and Sarah’s Instagram.