Princess Anne once got so furious with Sarah Ferguson that she was left wanting to throttle her at the dinner table, an author has claimed. During the breakdown of her marriage to Andrew Mountbatten Windsor in the early 1990s, Fergie was pictured having her toes sucked by her American “financial advisor” John Bryan as they enjoyed the sun in the south of France. Andrew Lownie wrote in his book “Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York” that the Princess Royal was left so frustrated by the photos appearing in the media, as well as Sarah’s reaction to them, that the late Queen Elizabeth II’s eldest daughter was on the verge of “throttling” her sister-in-law.

Fergie purportedly travelled to Balmoral to be with Andrew and the other royals after holidaying with Bryan. It is claimed that she then came down for breakfast to find her in-laws reading the newspapers and looking at the photos.

“She entered the breakfast room to find everyone reading the story and fled,” Lownie wrote, according to The Mirror.

“One person, who was present, told the duchess’s biographer Chris Hutchins that the Princess Royal ‘came close to throttling’ Sarah, and at dinner told her what she thought of her: ‘There was not one voice raised against Anne.

“Prince Andrew‘s anger melted into sadness and he buried himself in the special reports compiled for the Queen, which she did not hesitate to let him read.'”

A servant who was at Balmoral during the dramatic saga claimed that Sarah “acted in the strangest way”.

They added: “You would have thought she was the person wronged, as if she had every right to go on holiday with another man, kiss and cuddle him, and the only person who had behaved wrongly were the photographer and the editors of the newspapers who had published the pictures.”

King Charles III stripped Sarah’s husband Andrew of his “prince” title in October.

The late Queen Elizabeth II’s second son will move out of Royal Lodge in Windsor, where it was revealed he had been living, paying a peppercorn rent.

He is now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.