24/02/2026
A couple of recent newspaper articles have tentatively, and very inadequately, started to think on psychoanalytic lines about the possible roots of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's behaviour, mind-set, and attitudes as lying in his childhood, and the context which nurtured him (or perhaps didn't).
In The Spectator, Flora Watkins alluded to the 'parenting style' of Queen Elizabeth in this regard ('Andrew, the Queen and the pitfalls of ‘gentle parenting’, 20.2.26), whilst in The Times and The Sunday Times Hilary Rose looked into the 'highly abnormal environment that encouraged entitlement and prolonged immaturity', as she puts it ('Andrew’s (very) long fall from grace', 19.2.26).
It's one of the strengths and richnesses of the psychoanalytic tradition I think, that it reveals how much we are all shaped by our early upbringing, and in what ways, and - especially in more recent psychoanalytic work - how our social and cultural contexts powerfully influence who we are. As psychologist and psychoanalyst Alice Miller poignantly observed, 'the truth about our childhood is stored up in our body' ('Breaking Down the Walls of Silence', 1991).
A proper exploration of what happened to Andrew in this light would be deeply illuminating I feel - not only in his own case, but in shedding a much wider light on the whole system of privilege, entitlement, power, and relational dysfunction that characterises the class system of Britain, and has done for a very ling time. (Psychotherapist Nick Duffell's 2014 book 'Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion' is a really excellent exploration of this, and I include a chapter from it in my 2016 book 'The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness'. As he writes there, 'the Entitlement Illusion is not an isolated phenomenon but a systemic problem that affects the whole of our society.')
Below is the Times article, a modest but in places insightful start in this long overdue and neglected discussion, containing some rather eye-opening biographical details of Andrew's early years, and suggesting 'the ability to irritate he had honed in childhood', as it puts it: 'as a young man his behaviour was so atrocious that a footman punched him in the face.'
THE TIMES
Andrew’s (very) long fall from grace:
Before his car-crash Newsnight interview, ‘Randy Andy’ was causing the royals grief.
Hilary Rose on the life of the man formerly known as prince.
19th February 2026
"Where did it begin? Was it Newsnight, back in 2019? “Going to Pizza Express in Woking is an unusual thing for me to do”? “I didn’t sweat at the time”? Or can we actually date all the trouble, all the entitlement, all the grandiose self-importance, to the fact that an RAF flypast greeted his birth?
HRH Prince Andrew Albert Christian Edward, born at Buckingham Palace, had a reputation by the time he could walk. As a toddler he would kick the dogs and taunt the staff. As a five-year-old he was thrown in a dung heap by grooms at the Royal Mews in Windsor, sick of him taunting the horses with a stick. As a teenager he acquired the nickname Randy Andy, and as a young man his behaviour was so atrocious that a footman punched him in the face. Queen Elizabeth refused his subsequent offer to resign on the grounds that her son had obviously deserved it. Sixty-six years to the day since that flypast, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is spending his birthday in police custody. It seems unlikely that anyone bought him a cake.
While Charles, as heir, always lived in a gilded cage, Andrew’s gilded existence knew no bars. Indulged by his mother, he spent his childhood annoying almost everyone. Even she was irritated by his habit of climbing onto the roof of Buckingham Palace to tinker with the TV aerial so she couldn’t watch the racing. His idea of fun was to give the Queen Mother a whoopee cushion and sprinkle itching powder on his mother’s bed.
Princess Diana, who grew up with him, remembered him as “very, very noisy and loud. It occurred to me that there was something troubling him. He was happy to sit in front of the television all day watching cartoons. He’s not a goer. And he gets squashed by his family the whole time.” Until Newsnight, when he was 59 years old, his online biography still referred to his sporting prowess as a schoolboy at Gordonstoun. “HRH,” it read, “played rugby, field hockey and captained the 1st XI cricket team.” He left school with six O-levels and three A-levels. “He’s not academically bright,” said a friend in 1986, “but he is astute.” A female pupil at the school Andrew briefly attended in Canada described him as “about as subtle as a hand gr***de. It’s pathetic.”
For his 21st birthday party Windsor Castle was turned into a tropical paradise, no mean feat for February, and Elton John was hired to perform. Andrew was by then in the royal navy, training to be a pilot and exhibiting the ability to irritate he had honed in childhood. One co-worker at a navy air station in Cornwall described him as pig-headed, while another described him as toffee-nosed. “He doesn’t behave like everyone else,” they said. “He wants his own way and when he is around you have to bow and scrape. Even when he drives round the base in his car, you have to salute that. Fancy saluting a flipping car.”
He was 22 when he saw active service as a helicopter pilot in the Falklands, possibly the only period of his life on which he can reflect with satisfaction. “Of course I was frightened,” he once said with rare humility. “Everyone was frightened.” By the time he returned, rose between his teeth, the man forever “squashed” by his family was ready to embark on a new phase as its golden boy.
It did not last long. Behind the scenes, footmen were referring to him as Errol Flynn. His first love was Sandi Jones, the pretty blonde daughter of a colonel. “He loves girls,” she told The Sun. “He’s a real character who always tries to make people laugh.” Even his elder brother, Charles, described him, perhaps bitterly, as “the one with the Robert Redford looks”. (He also once said that Andrew’s problem was that he wanted to be him.)
He was the life and soul of the party at stately homes up and down the land, fond of playing “choo-choo train”, in which everyone conga’d round the room shouting “choo choo”.
Barely two years after he came ashore his father was reading him the riot act. On an official tour of California in 1984 he sprayed the press photographers with paint, a “prank” he no doubt thought hilarious. Instead, their expensive equipment was ruined and the work of the trip was overshadowed. Andrew was becoming a braying embarrassment and a furious Prince Philip told him to “pull his finger out and grow up”.
But at Ascot that summer, at a lunch hosted by his mother, he threw chocolate profiteroles at a vivacious young redhead called Sarah Ferguson. She evidently enjoyed it and, in an interview to mark their engagement the year after, described falling for his wit, charm and good looks. The bride’s father said Andrew was “an extremely lucky man” and huge crowds stood outside Buckingham Palace on a cloudy July day to watch them kiss.
Like so much else in Andrew’s life, it didn’t last. Four years after they married, Ferguson went on holiday with their two daughters and another man, Steve Wyatt, her financial adviser. Two years after that, the photos came out and the marriage was over. She blamed Charles and Diana for the breakdown of her marriage, her father blamed courtiers, and neither of the divorcing parties looked in the mirror. The marriage had lasted ten years, for four of which they were separated. Fergie complained to a glossy magazine in 1993 that she was sick of being blamed for everything and that “I want out of the whole thing so I can get on with my life”.
In the event she didn’t get out and she didn’t move on. Instead the divorced couple ended up holding court for decades at Royal Lodge in Windsor. She described herself as one half of the happiest divorced couple in the world and described Andrew as “the best man in the world”.
He was also once again putting the royal family in a bind. His naval career was coming to an end and his usefulness as a royal was limited. Sent to Lockerbie in the wake of the Pan Am disaster, he told residents the Americans had it much worse and that it had only been a matter of time before a plane fell out of the sky.
He also had no discernible source of income. The wheeze of making him special representative for international trade and investment must have seemed like a brilliant one: send him off to appear patriotic and useful somewhere else. “Prince Andrew,” the Palace said, “is keen to bang the drum for British exports.” Alas, he was similarly inclined to play golf, embarrass far-flung ambassadors with his boorish behaviour and run up enormous bills. Our man in Bahrain, deputy head of mission Simon Wilson, recalled that Andrew travelled with an entourage of equerries, private secretaries, valets and a 6ft ironing board to ensure the perfect pressing of his trousers. He was known throughout the Gulf, Wilson wrote, as HBH: his buffoon highness, a man “who appeared to regard himself as an expert in every matter”. A former ambassador to Italy noted Andrew’s fondness for laughing at his own jokes, and described his diplomatic skills as not always conducive to better relations with the people he was supposed to be schmoozing.
Meanwhile, back in England his collection of 72 teddies, most of them wearing sailor suits, kept the home fires burning. A maid recalled four years ago that she had been responsible for arranging them morning and night, in order of size on the bed and in specific places around the room at night. She received a day’s training for the job and, if she got it wrong, he would shout at her. “His two favourite bears,” she recalled, “sat on two thrones either side of the bed.”
Through it all, he appeared to believe that anyone enforcing the rules must be put in their place. Pulled over for speeding on his way to play golf in 2002 he told the policeman he was in a hurry. He refused to undergo routine security screening at Melbourne airport in 2005 before a flight to New Zealand, prompting one member of the security team to describe him as “a pompous prick. Who does he think he is?”
He wiped the floor with a policeman who mistook him for an intruder at Buckingham Palace, and caused a diplomatic incident when he criticised George W Bush’s administration over Iraq. He told Tatler in 2000: “I am a good deal more down to earth than people would expect of a member of the royal family. The ivory tower is not a syndrome from which I suffer.” Meanwhile, his ex-wife travelled the world banging the drum for herself and came home to “sell” access to her ex-husband to the News of the World for £500,000.
At every step the royal family must have hoped that Andrew couldn’t sink any lower. He lost the trade envoy job. He lost all his patronages, his HRH, his titles and finally his house. Today he was arrested, and tomorrow? Who knows? If Andrew’s inclined to look for a bright side, he might consider it a blessing that his mother didn’t live to see the day. Realistically, he probably won’t.”
https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/celebrity/article/andrew-mountbatten-windsor-arrested-emily-maitlis-bhpzv7953
I also remember reading a book in 2019, 'Ruling Class Men: Money, S*x, Power' by Mike Donaldson and Scott Poynting, which even then exposed much of Andrew's toxic past behaviour, and located this (as does Duffell) in a much wider exposé of social entitlement that our institutions and media have until now remained almost silent about, and acquiescent in. Here are some excerpts:
"Certainly, to men like Prince Andrew, the servants were ‘practically invisible ... since they were there to serve and not to question his actions’ (Berry, 1995: 37). He and Prince Philip would often walk about the house and property ‘as if nobody else was there’ (Berry, 1995: 66), the servants unnoticed unless their white gloves were dirty or they had made some error, perhaps in cooking or place-setting, then they ‘heard all about it’ (Berry, 1995, 69; Lewis, 1991: 173).
Prince Andrew took ‘delight in strutting around his apartment with nothing on, barking instructions as staff hurriedly picked up wet towels and dirty clothes strewn around the bed’ (Berry, 1995: 37). It makes them feel ‘special’ and important, Bronfman (1987: 68–69) was told. ‘Being waited on and the fact that I never cleaned my room in my whole life made me feel special. But as a child I never made a bed. I would drop clothes on the floor and they would magically disappear and come back clean.’
‘[Prince Andrew’s] bedtime habits as a single man left a lot to be desired, and a collection of scrunched-up, soiled tissues usually lay scattered around the bed each morning for staff to collect after they had made his bed’ (Berry, 1995: 37).
Ruling-class schools are not unique institutions in their close combining of class and gender processes but, within them, the two seem almost fused … A ‘language of masculine control’ pervaded school life. Bossing, accusing, lecturing, admonishing, interrogating, debating were some of the regular, everyday actions and institutional practices.
It is likely, then, that such men’s attitudes toward ‘playing the field’ are qualitatively different from the masculinities of other classes. Nancy Dickerson observed of Jack Kennedy, ‘All his life he was trained to view women as objects to be conquered, possessed. Jack had really no respect for women. You can hardly blame him. After all, Jack learned at the foot of the master’ (Andersen, 1996: 17).
Nancy Dickerson said, ‘To Jack, s*x was just like a cup of coffee – no more or less important than that’. Gore Vidal said, of the Kennedys, ‘In their world, infidelity simply doesn’t matter [...] They lived in a world where s*x is something you do like tennis.’"
And in a particularly salient observation, I think, in the light of what happened to Andrew, Donaldson and Poynting remark:
"This class is ‘nurtured’ by servants in the nursery, thus making love and emotion appear as a commodity provided by the market. Since all needs can be met in this way, the market releases the rich from the need for basic life skills while intensifying their dependence on it. They need no one person in particular, for the market meets their needs. This reinforces its centrality in their lives. Thus do they and the world they inhabit reflect to each other the harshness of the commodification of feeling, the price of love lost.
Rich boys grow up with the fact that most of the nurturance they receive is provided by those whose services are paid for. The absence of human touch, the lack of intimacy experienced and sense of formality compounded by the presence of servants in very large homes, intensifies the repression of emotions which are normally expressed only with and to those whose presence was typically uncertain and frequently short-lived. It is the servant’s job to provide essential warmth, assistance and understanding, compensating for lacks in the parenting the boys received, while simultaneously making less likely the possibilities for intimacy with parents and siblings in the home.
Reared to consider themselves unaccountable to the rules that apply to the rest of society, the only code of conduct they accept involves self-interest. A bout of failed companies early this century caused public outrage when their board members could be seen blatantly rewarding themselves with bonuses while taking individual shareholders and the smallest investors with stakes in superannuation funds to the wall. So engrained is this behaviour into the lives of the young men of this class that it promotes itself as ‘natural’ and universal in a way that excludes all other possibilities as it moulds them to fit into the ruthless and bullying sphere in which they will move as adults."
It might be timely for contemporary psychoanalysis to begin to excavate this mine, and hopefully a publisher like Karnac might commission some socially aware analyst to do exactly that.
