Sarah Ferguson reveals ‘mortifying’ first encounter with Prince Andrew

They’ve remained famously close despite their 1996 divorce, but Sarah Ferguson’s relationship with Prince Andrew got off to a hilariously awkward start.

In her tell-all memoir My Story, Fergie opened up about one of the first times she met Prince Andrew as an adult, it didn’t go quite as planned.

The now 65-year-old Duchess of York recalled a weekend at Floors Castle, the grand home of the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe.

Nervous and feeling out of her depth, Sarah made a beeline for the breakfast room, only to walk straight into a room full of men and newspapers.

“I just wanted to sit down and be ignored,” she wrote. But as she reached for a table to hide behind a newspaper, she suddenly found herself face-to-face with Andrew.

“I was ultra-nervous… and as he leaned across the table to grab a paper, I somehow thought he was going in for a kiss,” she recalled. “So I gave him a peck!”

His reaction was: “Oh, thank you very much!” she quoted him saying, leaving her mortified. “It honestly hadn’t been deliberate, just another Fergie fiasco.”

Not long after, Sarah was seated next to Andrew at a Windsor Castle lunch, a setup she later suspected was Princess Diana’s matchmaking at play.

The pair began dating that same year, and married in 1986.

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