LIZ JONES: Sarah Ferguson isn’t evil, she’s reckless and stupid. That’s why I feel sorry for her. And when you hear the awful things Andrew told friends, perhaps you will too…

What does it take to be classified as a victim? How do you qualify, and who decides?

After reading The Mail on Sunday’s revelation that Sarah Ferguson is on a sofa-surfing grand tour of Europe – albeit on luxurious couches, possibly in the castles of Italian counts and using burner phones to avoid detection – I felt unease that, yet again, a woman is being hounded and blamed. How frightened must she be?

I’m relieved, frankly, that Fergie still has friends who shelter her despite the damning revelations that she continued to associate with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein – after he’d been jailed for soliciting a 14-year-old girl for prostitution.

Fergie has been keeping in touch with friends through video calls, but it seems even they can’t help blabbing that the former Duchess of York is in a ‘dishevelled state’, in need of a Botox top-up and with her roots growing out.

Which rather sums up how she has been treated her entire life: mocked, found wanting and destined to be betrayed.

Of course, she’s reckless and stupid, but she is not a sex offender.

Fergie must be weighed down by the guilt of letting her daughters down and repeating the Ferguson family cycle of affairs followed by abandonment and now penury.

But I think that her fawning emails to Epstein, first revealed by The MoS, came not from a place of evil, but desperation.

As someone who has actually been made bankrupt, I know that there’s nothing more terrifying than losing everything. I’d wager Sarah found the prospect of public destitution worse than her two subsequent diagnoses of cancer, which at least garnered sympathy.

The truth is that her life, although privileged, was emotionally turbulent even before she met Prince Andrew, as he then was. 

Her father, Ronald Ferguson, had been educated at Eton and Sandhurst before joining the Life Guards: your typical cold fish – and an incorrigible philanderer to boot.

Ronald started playing polo and represented England, acting as unofficial polo manager for Prince Charles. He rose to become the Sovereign’s Escort, riding alongside the monarch at state and ceremonial occasions.

But it is said that the late Queen Elizabeth found him overbearing, once reminding Ferguson that the public came to see her, not him. 

Fergie’s glamorous mother, Susan, was aristocratic – the granddaughter of the 8th Viscount Powerscourt – and had come out as one of the last of the debutantes. 

Ronald and Susan had two daughters in three years with Sarah, the second, born in 1959. Yet there was to be little family happiness.

Susan became exasperated by her husband’s philandering and tragedy struck in 1969, when a third child died shortly after birth.

Sarah? She blamed the chaos on herself. While on holiday in Switzerland, she had stayed out too long so her mother went looking for her. Susan slipped and fell on the ice, causing her, it was said, to lose the baby. Sarah was convinced she’d been personally responsible for the disaster, once saying: ‘It was all because I had stayed out late’.

Sarah was sent to boarding school at the age of ten, where one report was eerily prophetic: ‘Sarah is erratic.’ At secretarial school she finished joint bottom of her cohort.

In 1972, her mother met the handsome Argentinian polo player Hector Barrantes.

Ronald was having an affair with a 23-year-old at the time, so Susan decided to leave him for Hector, moving to Argentina – and leaving her family behind, including a young and vulnerable Sarah.

Again, Fergie blamed herself and turned to comfort eating: ‘I ate my feelings, which is why I had weight problems from the age of 12.’

She needed a father figure but Ronald, needless to say, was endlessly selfish and fell short emotionally. He called his daughter ‘a ginger minge’.

Fergie’s jovial personality is rooted in low self-esteem. Women as beautiful as Diana Spencer, whom she knew from childhood, appeared to sail through life effortlessly (although the reality, we know, was different). Sarah had to work at it, meaning she put up with far too much.

In 1980 she met Paddy McNally, a former racing driver and widower 22 years her senior with two teenage sons. She called him ‘the Toad’, but he was generous and rich. McNally teased Sarah about her weight and was open about his affairs. She would have married him, only he didn’t ask.

In 1984, Diana, who needed an ally, engineered a meeting between Sarah and Andrew. They shared a childish sense of humour, and romance blossomed.

Their 1986 wedding was watched by millions and her personal attitude – one of Joyce Grenfell-esque glee – showed up the Charles and Diana nuptials as hopelessly stiff in comparison.

Within weeks, Andrew became grumpy. There were financial problems. Andrew was overseas with the Royal Navy for much of the time and Sarah was left to fend for herself, including through pregnancy with their first child, Beatrice.

And she continued struggling with her weight. According to Andrew Lownie’s recent biography of the couple, Entitled, Fergie weighed more than 200 pounds (more than 14 stone).

Would you like your weight to be published?

Remember the 51 pieces of excess baggage she travelled with? In my view, Fergie was self-medicating, numbing the hurt and humiliation by buying stuff – and yet more stuff.

She suffered from post-natal depression when Beatrice was born. We have sympathy for this now – look how we wrung our hands when the current Princess of Wales was hit with acute morning sickness. But back then, Sarah received little support.

She sold a photo of Beatrice to Hello! magazine for £250,000, most of which went to bail out her heavily indebted mother in Argentina.

Ask anyone what they think of when you say the name Fergie and after ‘Epstein’ they will say, ‘Oh, the toe sucking!’ – a reference to her being caught on camera having her feet kissed by a lover, millionaire financial adviser John Bryan, in 1992.

Fifty-five photos were published over nine pages of a tabloid newspaper. Just think: your bottom, resembling a Viennetta left out in the St Tropez sun, shared on Instagram. Who’d come back from that?

Fergie had already conducted an affair with American millionaire Steve Wyatt, despite the fact he told her she was ugly and fat. According to former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, Andrew once referred to her as a ‘fat cow’.

(Another Wyatt, the commentator and politician Woodrow, would later remark that Sarah was ‘like a barmaid who had come into some money’.)

It was the affair with Steve Wyatt that finally prompted her divorce, but don’t forget that her husband had reportedly slept with a dozen women by the time their first wedding anniversary came round.

Even Sarah’s flight instructors – she was the first female royal to hold a pilot’s licence – nicknamed her ‘Chatterbox One’. There is barely one small corner of her life in which she has been treated with respect.

It’s telling Sarah had crushes on famous men: Michael Hutchence, Tiger Woods, JFK Junior. She preferred to kiss a poster on a bedroom wall than deal with flesh and blood. She’s a hopeless romantic, after all.

It’s no wonder that Fergie’s first stop on her exile after the release of the Epstein files – and yet more damning material about her behaviour – was the Paracelsus Recovery clinic in Zurich.

Its founder, Jan Gerber, once told me, ‘It’s easier to have sympathy with a starving child in Africa. To have empathy with someone rich and famous is more difficult. But I believe our empathy with a human being’s pain should not be conditional.’

I second that. Sarah is a human being, certainly not the villain of the piece.

Even Andrew Lownie, one of her fiercest critics, writes: ‘We must remember Sarah has been a huge force for good with her charitable endeavours.’

When Sarah married Andrew, she was granted a new coat of arms, with the motto: ‘Out of adversity, happiness grows.’

I hope that’s true.