Diana Reportedly Had Strong Opinions About ‘Troubling’ Andrew Long Before His Royal Exile—He Wasn’t ‘for Her’
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor struck a chord with Princess Diana during her marriage to King Charles. New reports of how the Princess of Wales felt about her brother-in-law emerged as his titles got stripped away.
According to Andrew Lownie’s book Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, Diana depicted Andrew as “very, very noisy and loud,” and wondered if “there was something troubling” him. He added that she noted that his personality “wasn’t for [her],” observing that he was “very happy to sit in front of the television all day watching cartoons and videos.” Diana observed that Andrew was not “not a doer.”
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“One moment he would be diligent and polite, the next aggressive and rude,” Lownie wrote of Andrew. “Like his father [Prince Philip], he had a short temper, a rather Germanic sense of humor, and did not bear fools gladly.”
Royal expert Ingrid Seward wrote in her book My Mother and I about Queen Elizabeth that the late-monarch wanted Diana to be with Andrew instead of Charles because of the age difference. Andrew was born a year before Diana, while Charles had an age gap of almost 13 years. “I think some of Diana’s friends thought that Andrew would be more fun for her than Charles because [Andrew] was very much her age and he was full of fun and everything else,” Seward previously told Us Weekly. But, Seward said, “Diana wasn’t interested in Andrew. It was Charles she was interested in.”
Diana even played matchmaker for Andrew and his now-ex-wife Sarah Ferguson after the former Duke of York complained about his love life. Lownie wrote that Diana “was in need of an ally at court” and that she invited Fergie to a royal party and “whether by luck or design,” Andrew ended up sitting next to Ferguson.
One palace source noted that Fergie “was all high-jinks and jolly-hockey sticks and practical jokes. Andy loved it, no one else did.”
