“FROM SISTERS-IN-ARMS TO SILENT WAR?!” — The Unimaginable Reason Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson Fell Out

The friends-turned-sisters-in-law weren’t speaking to each other by the time Diana died

est friends from their teenage years, Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson were in each other’s lives long before they became sisters-in-law. The late Princess of Wales even played matchmaker for Sarah and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, a match that ultimately brought Sarah into the British royal family. Both women would go on to separate from their respective husbands in 1992 and finalize their divorces in 1996.

Though people tried to portray her and Diana “all the time as rivals,” Sarah once wrote in an open letter for HELLO! that the two of them never “ever really felt” that way. While not rivals, the former Duchess of York acknowledged in her autobiography, Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself, that it was “true,” her and Diana’s “friendship was periodically strained”.

Their friendship eventually ended in a falling out. At the time of Diana’s death in 1997, the ex-wives of Queen Elizabeth‘s two elder sons were no longer on speaking terms.

A fall out

“Sadly, at the end we hadn’t spoken for a year, though I never knew the reason, except that once Diana got something in her head, it stuck there for a while,” Sarah penned in her 2011 book. “I wrote letters, thinking whatever happened didn’t matter, let’s sort it out. And I knew she’d come back. In fact, the day before she died she rang a friend of mine and said, ‘Where’s that Red? I want to talk to her.’”

“In any sibling relationship, there are ups and downs and peaks and troughs, but we were always steadfast in our friendship. We never let the sun go down on too many heated discussions. Our bond was never broken.”

Borrowed shoes led to a broken bond

Although Sarah claimed in her biography to not know the reason for the falling out, it’s been traced back to an anecdote published in her earlier autobiography, My Story: Sarah, the Duchess of York. In the 1996 book, Andrew’s ex revealed that she contracted plantar warts (verrucas) from shoes she borrowed from Diana.

“When I lived in Clapham, Diana helped me by giving me all her shoes (and, less happily, her plantar warts) – we wore the same size,” Sarah recalled.

© Jayne Fincher/Princess Diana Archive/Getty Images
Sarah Ferguson revealed in an autobiography that she contracted plantar warts from Diana

The line proved to be “fatal,” according to author Tina Brown, sending Sarah to Siberia “for good”. Tina penned in the 2007 biography The Diana Chronicles: “The divorced Duchess had cashed in with an anodyne memoir, which was full of nice comments about her sister-in-law – except for one fatal line. She wrote that when she borrowed a pair of Diana’s shoes she had caught a verruca from them. Goddesses don’t get warts.”

“Despite Fergie’s pleading apologies, Diana never spoke to her again.”

Still loved

Estranged in the end, Sarah has nonetheless spoken warmly of her “much loved sister-in-law and dear friend” since her death. Speaking exclusively to HELLO! in 2021, the former Duchess admitted: “I think about her most days because she’s the only other person who knew and was around at that time in the 80s, when we all wore those very strange clothes,” adding: “She was in the family before me and we had such fun.”

Sarah has also praised Diana, calling her “angelic, beautiful” and “so funny”. She gushed: “There’s nobody like her. I’ll always remember her tinkling laughter and her being so naughty with her jokes. At dinner, she’d say something under her breath to me and then I would peal with laughter, and then uncontrollably not be able to stop it. And she would be able to control herself completely, so it looked like I was always naughty.”

“There was a stage when I think people tried to separate us, and it made me so sad because I adored her. I still adore her,” she said, before proclaiming, “I love her.”

“So I always say, it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, if you love them, you love them,” Sarah added. “So my heart is always with her.”