Mister Mystery

Nowhere near as long ago as it seems, I first heard that someone had been misgendered, and I thought, "Gosh, that does sound painful." I have had a similar reaction, which I am told was exactly the wrong one, to the news that the former Andrew Mountbatten Windsor had been hyphenated. He has now had three names in well under a fortnight. Or possibly four, since on Monday's Newsnight, Victoria Derbyshire twice called him "Andrew Windsor" before someone had clearly been in her ear and she called him "Andrew Mountbatten Windsor" the third time.

The lack of the hyphen made "Mountbatten" look like a middle name, as if, like Elizabeth II, he had been only distantly related to the old Duke of Edinburgh, while "Windsor" might have suggested that his parents had not been married to each other. But "Mountbatten-Windsor" was the surname that, in 1960, the then Queen conferred on those needing such a thing among her descendants, so here we are. Yet her third child remains a Mister, and not Lord Firstname Surname, as would befit the younger son of a Duke. Whatever does it all mean?