Blimey. Another day of revelations regarding Sarah Ferguson, former wife of former Prince Andrew, former duchess, former toast of 1980s society; now disgraced subsidiary in the whole, vile Epstein scandal… Another insight into a completely extraordinary set of life choices. According to yesterday’s Mail on Sunday, Ferguson (who hasn’t been seen in public since December — unless you count unsubstantiated Nessie-type spottings in Dubai, Switzerland and Ireland, and I’m not sure you can) is on a “secret sofa-surfing world tour”. An international flit that has her bouncing from the home of one discrete and loaded friend to another, while in possession of not one but three burner phones. Her (self-evidently) less discrete and (presumably, because they’re talking to the press) less loaded friends are reporting she’s remaining in touch via FaceTime calls, and that she’s in a “dishevelled state”.

“She hasn’t been taking care of her roots or keeping up with her Botox,” one of them told the Mail, in such a way as to suggest they themselves had been on a recent FaceTime with Fergie (also that grey roots and ill-kempt Botox are the definitive signs of anyone’s desperate late-stage coming undone… Actually, I’m inclined to agree with that. They certainly would be in my case. Last things to go). (Oh — also? That person is either a woman or a gay man; while a straight man might be left with a general sense of disrepair, I’m not sure they’d zero in on the roots and emergent wrinkles with that level of specificity… Though maybe I’m being reductively sexist here.)

Anyway.

“She has three phones and she goes cycling through them because she’s afraid that she might be being tracked. She is convinced that a lot of people wish her harm,” says the same friend. (NB while you and I might not instantly identify a person who’d had a private call with us then promptly and anonymously relayed its content to a national newspaper as a “friend”, it’s important to understand that the likes of Ferguson exist in different social conditions, ones built on wary allegiances and expectations of mutual back-scratchings rather than actual friendship — the kind of highly transactional arrangements that can bite one on the arse periodically, with a little light leaking.)

Can I be honest? It was on hearing of the burner phones that I felt, maybe not “respect” for Fergie — not exactly — but something closer to it than I had ever felt before. Pre the Epstein revelations, she’d served in my imagination as one of those high-profile hot messes who makes you feel better about your own screw-ups, because they are in no sense as bad as hers. I pitied her and she amused me, but did I respect her? No! Post the Epstein revelations, she actively appalled me; the grovelling and fawning and “just marry me” — ugh. But now? I can’t help but feel that, were I required to go on the run from a reputation-destroying scandal with likely legal implications, I wouldn’t be as good at it as she appears to be. I certainly wouldn’t know where to get a burner phone. Never mind three.

Nor would I be able to rely on a network of wealthy friends over assorted continents to put me up in their guest wings. I do not have a network of wealthy friends over assorted continents. I’ve just got… You know. Friends. And the one phone. On a contract.

I also (oh God, this is a bit embarrassing) don’t have a former relationship with a much older count on which I might fall back, in the event of my being cut loose by the royal family, hounded by the press, forced into fleeing and so forth; but Sarah Ferguson does. Count Gaddo della Gherardesca, her last known boyfriend, is 86 years old with a family pile in Tuscany, a ski lodge in Verbier, a mention of a 13th-century ancestor in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and a nephew who was shot and killed by accident during a boar hunt (what else?) in 2010. According to The Friend, Ferguson is currently “staying in some place which is like a castle, and apparently there is an Italian count looking after her”. Assuming Fergie isn’t on can-you-sequester-me-in-your-castle terms with more than one count — and let’s face it, she could be — this is probably Gaddo.

Who, by the way, isn’t even her only much older, much richer ex-boyfriend. She went out with Paddy McNally, the entrepreneur and former racing driver, now 88, for three years before she met and married Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Another loose-lipped friend of Fergie (collectively, by the way, this set is known as FoF, Friends of Fergie) claimed she had been staying with McNally in his Wiltshire home (as distinct from his home in Verbier and his home in St Tropez) as recently as last month. “A lot of people, including well-known people, are quietly still very loyal to her,” yet another Friend explained. “Not that anyone is boasting about it.”

Fergie is said to be miserable in her new circumstances, asking, “How am I going to get through this?” and complaining “a lot about being broke — although I don’t know if that is broke in the sense that you or I would understand it”, said yet another one of those FoFs inclined to leak. Still, you could be forgiven for imagining she’d spent her former life planning for these contingencies, getting her wealthy counts in a row and so forth. Because — grey roots and Botox notwithstanding — Sarah Ferguson does seem unnervingly good at being on the run. Certainly a great deal better at it than I’d be.