A fortnight ago, I was asked to give a psychological perspective on a breakfast television show on the continuing developments in the life of the Andrew formerly known as prince. I tried to express my thoughts but was given insufficient time to do so. As the story grows exponentially, I have decided to write what I would ideally have had time to say in this letter.
Hello, Andrew.
My name is Pam. I’m seven months older than you. When I was a little girl, living in London, my dad used to take me to feed the ducks in St James’s Park, and he used to laugh and tell me that I was walking in the bit of your mum’s garden that people like us were allowed walk in. I lived over the newsagent’s shop that my family used to run, about five miles from Buckingham Palace, and that seemed incredible to me.
Contemporaneous childhoods
I knew there were two little boys about the same age as me living in the palace, and that they had an older brother and sister a few years older than my brother. As a small child, I sometimes wondered how different your life was to mine, usually on those walks. I never have really followed royal news, so I didn’t think any more about you than that, until you appeared in the papers in the summer of 1976, when we were both 16, and both in Canada, you at the Olympic Games, me summering with my aunt in Toronto.
People kept telling me you were very good looking. I couldn’t really see that. And anyway, there was something about you I felt was just a bit … off. I guess I did feel a bit sorry for you being defined against your older siblings. It was something I experienced, too.
My husband (three months older than you) has an earlier memory of you – that someone gave you a James Bond car that really worked when we were all around five, he saw you driving it around those big gardens on TV, and that he disliked you on sight from that moment onwards.
Same generation, different worlds
And that was the problem for you, really, wasn’t it Andrew? As human beings, there were things we shared, but they came to you with privileges. As a fashion student in London in that culture explosion time when the 1970s blended into the 1980s, I probably came within 100 metres of you, many times. But I had to queue to get in, while they let you in the back door, and you didn’t mix with us, but with the other millionaire’s kids.
In our early twenties, I remember laughing when a friend who had a husband in the navy told me that you were ‘dim’ and ‘awful’ and widely known as ‘Prince Bullshit.’ I did think, just for a moment then, that however rich you were, that type of fame must hang around your neck like a millstone; being defined in terms of your family by everyone, everywhere, while people like me could be genuine strangers with a clean slate that other people could get to know.
Spare
Also, I was light years away from that ‘being defined in the shade of an older sibling’ phase, while you were always and ever going to be ‘the spare’ to your older brother. And when he had kids, you were going to be the second spare, and if more came along, then the third spare… and so on.
Many years later, your nephew wrote a book about this which I reviewed from the position of the psychologist I had become, and, although at times he came across as spoiled and petulant, I did find a fair amount of sympathy for the unique dysfunctionality of his upbringing, this time from a parental point of view – your two girls and your older nephews are a similar age to my children.
Generations
And now, of course, I couldn’t miss the news about you that was constantly pumped out of our now 24-hour, multimedia interfaces. It got me thinking that our ‘greatest generation’ parents were very competent at teaching us right from wrong, even if they often went at it from a place we would nowadays call ‘poorly psychologically informed’. Did I mention that our parents were around the same age, and that my dad was also a sailor in the second world war? So I was horrified to read reports of your alleged behaviour.
He saw your great uncle in a club in New York during that time, and used to reminisce about how heavily he was drinking, and that he ‘looked like a ‘broken man.’ Another royal SNAFU, the heir who was told he must be king, but couldn’t handle it, and the spare who didn’t want to be king, but was made to. I wonder, if we could somehow converse with your family across generations, what sort of patterns we would find, that might lead us to better understand what led you to become who you are.
No excuses
I should say here, that psychologist or not, I am resolute in the belief that your upbringing gives you no excuses if you have even done a tenth of what you are accused of. Because – you had choices, didn’t you, Andrew? Less than me in some ways, but more than me in others. You had enough money to keep you in lavish style, access to the most accomplished scientists, actors, artists, musicians, historians, and a platform to engage in work that could help less fortunate others across the globe. But unfortunately, that wasn’t what you chose. You chose to join what probably appeared to you, at the time, as the international jet-set circle of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein and well … here we are.
And please, don’t give me the ‘well, things were different then’ line – like a lot of men of your age, Andrew. Yes, times were different, and I’m sure there are a lot of sixty-somethings out there cringing at the memory of behaviours that would now be thought of as ‘inappropriate,’ or even ‘highly inappropriate.’ But what you are accused of goes light years beyond this, into the realms of serious criminality. Some of the accusations may not, of course, be true; we must remember that they haven’t been tested in a court of criminal law.
Ego integrity or despair
Both of us are getting into the lifestage where we work out our last life ‘crisis’, where the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson proposed that we reflect upon whether the life we have led leads us to ‘ego integrity’ or ‘despair.’ His theory is a useful tool to reflect ‘in theory’ on ‘where we are’ in this respect, but in real life, I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as that. Most people have things they are proud of (I think for those of us who have children, they usually rank highly in this respect) and things we wish we’d done differently.
And I’m sure you are proud of your lovely daughters Andrew, and their babies, and you must be horribly upset if they are trying to distance themselves from you. All in all, I’d guess that you probably feel more despair than most people in their mid-sixties and this being reflected in this weekend’s stories about you.
Redemption?
So, how to seek redemption? Well, to me and I suspect many others out there, the answer to this is obvious. Give the fullest evidence that you can, about Epstein and his web of vice, blackmail and bribery, under oath. And if you feel you are only able to manage doing this in the UK and thereafter make only the full transcript available to the public, rather than in the full public gaze, then that will be enough.
I realise that this must seem like the most daunting task that you have ever contemplated. But in the end, I believe it is the only solution to finding the integrity you seek. Verify the evidence of those women whose lives the Epstein empire ruined, to the full extent that you can. Assist law enforcement across the western world to make those rich and powerful men (and probably, even some women) answer for their crimes.
You will no doubt still have to deal with overwhelming feelings of remorse, whatever you choose to do now. But I think it is giving testimony that will, at last, allow you to use that world platform you inherited at birth in a positive fashion, and give you some modicum of peace of mind. And always remember: this is a choice. And that it may be the final major one of your life. So, please, Andrew – make it the right one this time.
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