Sarah Ferguson leaves Royal Lodge staff with ‘extraordinary’ problem over Amazon boxes

With Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor moving out of the controversial Royal Lodge, his ex-wife faces a tricky challenge as she seeks a new home

With Christmas fast approaching, many of us are struggling to find homes for all of the various parcels that are turning up on our doorsteps daily. But that problem is particularly extreme for former Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson, says royal author Andrew Lownie, as she prepares to downsize from the sprawling Royal Lodge.

Andrew dismissed reports that Ms Ferguson is eyeing a move to “a converted cattle shed on Princess Beatrice’s £3.5 million Cotswolds estate”, telling Reach PLC: “Not sure Sarah herself knows where she is going. Switzerland, Portugal, Cotswolds, Windsor, London. For the moment she can stay at Royal Lodge until October.”

But when she does eventually find herself a new home, the sheer volume of possessions that need to be relocated is stumping staff, Lownie says. He explains on his personal Substack: “I wrote in Entitled that at Sunninghill Park, there was a warehouse style room nicknamed ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ which contained thousands of gifts.

“Similarly I’m told that there are so many unopened Amazon boxes at Royal Lodge that nobody knows quite what to do with them.” It has created an “extraordinary challenge”, he claims.

The former duchess reportedly has a huge mountain of unopened parcels to deal with (Image: Getty)

Both Ms Ferguson and Mr Mountbatten-Windsor will be moving to new homes in 2026 (Image: Getty)

The one-time Duchess’s extravagant spending has long been the stuff of legend. Lownie wrote in his book, Entitled, that by 1995, she had amassed debts of £3.7m.

A former staff member claimed to him that Ferguson would stage lavish banquets for herself and her two daughters, with much of the food going to waste. He claimed: “Every night she demands a whole side of beef, a leg of lamb and a chicken which are laid out on the dining room table like a medieval banquet that would make Henry VIII proud.

“But often there is just her and her girls, Bea and Eugenie, and most of it is wasted. There is no attempt to keep it to have it cold the next day. It just sits there all night, and the next day it’s thrown away.”

Ms Ferguson regularly splurged on expensive holidays (Image: Getty)

She also allegedly spent freely on gifts for friends, staff and hangers-on, despite often complaining that she was running out of money.

In his book, Lownie writes: “But still the spending went on – £14,000 in just one month with a particular London wine merchant.

“Over the previous year Sarah had travelled to Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Poland and made four trips to America, each time staying at the luxury Carlyle Hotel, where the cheapest suite was £330 a night.”

Ferguson’s former lover John Bryan [R] said she was a big spender (Image: Daily Mirror)

Lownie adds: “On a three-day visit to New York, she had one car to take her to the airport and another for her ten suitcases, all tissue-lined, with more outfits than she could hope to wear. Her assistant Christine Gallagher had once been sent on Concorde, at a cost of £5,000, to bring her some paperwork.”

John Bryan, whose affair with Ferguson led to her divorce from Prince Andrew – as he then was – revealed that the profligate duchess’s £860,000 annual expenditure included £300,000 on staff, £150,000 on gifts, £50,000 on flowers, £50,000 on parties, £150,000 on travel and £100,000 on clothes – £25,000 of it spent in single hour in top New York store Bloomingdales.

A representative for Sarah Ferguson was contacted in connection with this story, but declined to comment.