Actress Ruthie Henshall, who dated Prince Edward for half a decade starting in 1988, has exposed the bombshell confession Sarah Ferguson made about her then-husband Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, formerly the Duke of York. Ruthie, who still texts the prince to this day, wrote in a column for the Daily Mail that while the pair were existing in a “lovely kind of bubble”, things weren’t the same for Andrew and Fergie.

Ruthie said that while Edward would take her to “cheap and cheerful Soho restaurants” to eat, Queen Elizabeth, by contrast, “had only been to one restaurant in her life”. King Charles “tended to eat at exclusive private dining clubs”, she said, and claimed: “Sarah [Ferguson] later complained to me that Andrew had never even been to a pub.”

Andrew famously claimed in his BBC interview with Emily Maitlis that he ate at Pizza Express in Woking, which provided him an alibi when it was alleged he had sex with 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre.

He said: “I was with the children and I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party at I suppose four or five in the afternoon. And then because the duchess [Sarah Ferguson] was away, we have a simple rule in the family that when one is away the other is there.”

We do know now that Andrew went on to frequent the Red Lion at Axford in Marlborough, a country pub that has now closed down. He used the pub as a base to visit Princess Eugenie while she boarded at Marlborough College between 2003 and 2008.

In her column, Ruthie explained that Edward’s apartment on the second floor at Windsor Castle had originally been the nursery he had shared with his brother Andrew, explaining: “The bathroom alone was the size of my whole flat.”

The toilet had a private curtain around it, and she revealed Edward “had nametags in all his underwear”, reading HRH Edward, so that staff could distinguish which piece belonged to which member of the family during laundry.