AMANDA PLATELL: King Charles will rue the day he humiliated Fergie. All the winning cards are now in her hands. I know her next move – it’s devastating

What next for Sarah Ferguson, after spending most of her adult life indulging in greed for money and status?

She is as mortified as her ex-husband Andrew after emails emerged in The Mail on Sunday showing she continued her obsequious relationship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein even after he told the world she had cut ties with him.

Today he finds himself thrown into the unforgiving fires of reputation hell.

Fun-loving Fergie, who continued to live with Andrew rent-free at the Royal Lodge for decades after their divorce, giddily referring to herself as one half of “the happiest divorced couple in the world”, was brutally murdered by the King.

Of course, it’s no more than what this greedy woman deserves. A woman who clung to the title of Duchess of York even after her divorce from Andrew in 1996 and used it to make money through endorsements, children’s books and romance novels.

And let’s not forget the £800,000 he was paid for his pathetic autobiography in 2013, which, to be fair, was relatively harmless.

Weeks ago it was reported that Prince Andrew was ‘hysterical’ when he was stripped of his title as Duke of York and Fergie as Duchess for the first time.

So if that’s the case then, what is he like now?

So what can the future hold for him?

His lucrative children’s book career is in tatters. His career as a romantic novelist was also dead and buried. No respectable charity could touch it with a barge pole; The door to salvation through good works has been slammed in his face.

Even more worrying for Fergie’s release is where she will live now that she and Andrew have been kicked out of the Royal Lodge. He was told to make his own living arrangements, while he was exiled to ‘private accommodation’ at Sandringham Manor, paid for by the King.

After such public humiliation, Fergie begins to face life alone.

Yes, she has daughters Beatrice and Eugenie to hold on to, but even they must have been horrified to learn of their mother’s ongoing close personal and financial relationship with Epstein.

I wonder if both of them will want my mother to come and live with them when their mothers are so disgraced and have husbands, careers and children to think about? Flat extension of grandma? I doubt it.

But if there’s one thing we know about Fergie, it’s that she has a surprising ability to reinvent herself.

And his reinvention is a prospect that would make the King tremble with anxiety, despite everything he had done to exile him.

Fergie’s daughters, princesses Beatrice and Eugenie (pictured with their mother) must have been horrified after learning of their mother’s proximity to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, writes Amanda Platell

Because a released Fergie could wreak havoc on the Royal family. The terrible truth is that he could have chosen to write another memoir, this time revealing everything. And he would be paid millions for it.

After all, he had a front row seat to the Royal family circus for decades. Princess Diana’s best friend, confidant during the torment of Diana’s divorce. Ah, the secrets she had to keep that might be revealed in another Oprah interview.

The multi-million pound Fergie Netflix show about the fearsome Royal family could make Harry and Meghan’s devastating six-part series – the broadcaster’s highest-rated show in 2022 – a walk in the park on a sunny day.

I’m afraid the King’s public humiliation of Fergie will come back to haunt Charles.

Providing him with the millions he’s been waiting for and the home he thinks he’s entitled to is suffocating him, but it may be the only way to keep his silence.

The only way to save the monarchy from an attack from another front, a tell-all.