“I think she will be a great asset,” he announced to all and sundry at the time.
Sarah is demanding for her real status and as senior royal member. Her rather boisterous approach was a refreshing change to the personal dramas of Princess Diana. It was clear who was his favourite daughter-in-law.
After a married to Prince Andrew, Duchess of York had spent a lot money and penchant for the high life soon earned her the nickname “Freeloading Fergie”.
“Philip became more and more irritated with Fergie and what he described as her ‘antics’,” royal biographer Ingrid Seward claimed in the book Prince Philip Revealed. “He began to take every opportunity to criticise her.”
“It was the death-knell for their relationship,” Ingrid says. “Philip simply doesn’t like being challenged by someone he considers his intellectual inferior.”
The brewing squall turned into a raging storm in 1992, when the estranged Andrew and Sarah divorced.
Sarah has a relationship with American businessman John Bryan, this explosive scandal ruins the British monarch massively.
“He was furious because he saw it as her undermining what he had taken years to establish – undermining the monarchy, undermining her own husband,” Ingrid reveals.
Philip banned his former daughter-in-law from all royal occasions, and commentators in the UK’s Daily Express newspaper claimed they “can’t be in the same room together”.
And relations became even more strained in 2010 when Sarah was caught demanding £500,000 from an undercover newspaper reporter posing as a wealthy Arab businessman, in return for promising to arrange business meetings with and access to Andrew.
Not too surprisingly, Sarah was left off the invitation list a year later to the wedding of her nephew Prince William to Kate Middleton.
But by the time Prince Harry married Meghan Markle in 2018, Sarah had inched her way back into favour and was invited. Philip, however, studiously avoided her throughout the ceremony.