Junk the Jubilee - Elizabeth Windsor has led a life of unmitigated weirdness, leaving her emotional machinery almost entirely out of order. By Johann Hari

Monarchists claim to love and respect the Queen - yet they snatched her at birth and systematically ruined her life. As we mark 50 years of tormenting her on the throne, it is perhaps time we looked at the damage we have inflicted on Elizabeth Windsor.

There was one, brief period of her life in which she was able to escape the institution into which she was born. When she first married Philip Mountbatten, she travelled to Malta, where she lived from 1950-51 as a comparatively normal Navy wife. Marian Crawford - who, as her nanny, was Elizabeth's de facto mother - explained: "The Princess had no very clear understanding of the way people lived outside palace walls. But when she flew to visit Prince Philip in Malta, she saw and experienced for the first time the life of an ordinary girl not living in a palace."

This period is invariably described by Elizabeth's friends as her happiest time. She could socialise, have tea and generally be an officer's wife around town. She could see the life she might have had, if only the monarchy had not existed. Lady Kennard, a very good friend of Elizabeth's, has said: "I'm quite sure that the first five years they spent together [before Elizabeth became Queen] were the happiest days of their life. The Princess was able to live just like an ordinary naval officer's wife and it was the only time that she lived such a free life."

Her closest friend, Patricia Mountbatten, has explained that being wrenched from this life was "a tragedy . . . From the Queen's point of view it was a disaster that it all [that is to say, becoming monarch] happened so soon". Or, we could add, that it happened at all. It is the monarchists and their demands who wrenched her from this dream world.

Either side of this period of bliss, there is a life of such unmitigated weirdness that we have to look to Michael Jackson, paraded from birth as a performing freak, to find another child who was so ruthlessly pushed into the public eye from infancy. Elizabeth's childhood is invariably presented in monarchist propaganda as a time of unbroken happiness. This is in blatant contradiction of the facts.

As a little girl, Elizabeth witnessed the institution of monarchy reduce her father to a gibbering wreck. The poor man dreaded appearing in public, and suffered from a severe stammer. He hated speaking so much that many people believed he was retarded. When his brother abdicated and it became clear that he would have to be king, he became nearly hysterical. He told the former prime minister Ramsay Macdonald that he was so sickened during the ceremony that he was entirely unaware of what was happening.

What can witnessing all of this have made the young Elizabeth feel about the fate that awaited her? Is it any wonder that, as Lord Strathmore said, the young girl, when she realised that she too would have to suffer in this way, began to "pray for a brother" who would take precedence over her in the succession and save her from becoming monarch?

Elizabeth was strictly instructed not to allow herself to behave like a normal child. Lady Mountbatten reveals that "she was very aware that how she behaved in public was very important. For instance . . . she knew she must try not to cry."

Sealed off from the normal social interaction of school, Elizabeth found it hard to make friends. Crawford describes a "rather special friendship" that she fleetingly formed with the daughter of a neighbour, but this ended when the friend was sent away to school and Elizabeth was left, once more, alone. She has never at any point been able to have a proper friend. One ex-lady-in-waiting told Ben Pimlott, Elizabeth's biographer, that the royals "never have entirely normal relationships. Even your best friends like Porchey ['Lord' Porchester], or oldest courtiers like Martin Charteris, treat you with special courtesy." Patricia Mountbatten has admitted: "I never for a moment forget that she is my sovereign." What a great friendship that must be - and yet it is said to be Elizabeth's closest.

"Duty" was so vehemently drummed into her by her parents that, as Prince Philip once said: "If it was customary to have porridge at every meal, Lilibet [Elizabeth] would have it." Elizabeth was forced to offer up her life for public consumption because she was told that it was her "duty" and that she would be betraying her family, her country and God if she refused.

As if to compound the misery of this uniquely awful childhood, Elizabeth was subjected to systematic and deliberate parental neglect. As with so many victims of poor parenting, she in turn inflicted her experience on her own children. The "requirements of royalty" meant that her parents abandoned their small children for months on end, entrusting them to anonymous nannies. They jetted off to Australia for six months when their child couldn't even talk, and barely recognised her when they returned. If a working-class woman living on a council estate behaved in this way, she would be branded as "the worst mother in Britain", a "home-alone mum", "unfit to raise kids", and so on.

Elizabeth was to continue this tragic cycle and show similar, breathtaking cruelty to her own children. When her eldest son was just three years old, she abandoned him for six months to travel abroad. When she returned to England, she spent four days dealing with paperwork and another day at the races before she deigned to see her child. When finally they were reunited, the tiny boy was forced to wait in line to shake his mother's hand.

Douglas Hurd, who got to know her very well when he was foreign secretary, has commented that Elizabeth's "constitutional machinery" is in tip-top shape, but her "emotional machinery" is almost entirely out of order. The monarchy, not some inbuilt defect, had made her this way. "You see, if you are brought up to live your life in the eyes of the world," Patricia Mountbatten has pointed out, "you can't afford to be seen to be terribly sad, or in tears or cross or even unwell. You have to have such total control over yourself at all times that it then becomes quite difficult to show your emotions, even in private. I think that is a particular thing with the royal family - they cannot be seen to be other than totally composed and in control of the situation in public, and that spills over into their private life."

Lord Charteris, Elizabeth's former private secretary (a man who spent every working day with her for over a decade), said that the key to the Queen's character is that she is "afraid of her emotions". This, he confirms, is a product of her job. One of her most senior ladies-in-waiting told the Telegraph journalist Graham Turner that "the Queen does not like emotion, and for very good reasons".

She went on to explain that, if you showed your emotions, this might spill over into your constitutional role. So, as Hurd, who accompanied Elizabeth on many state visits, explains: "She has almost trained feelings out of herself." We can reasonably conclude that this is an inhuman and cruel job that should go the way of child chimney-sweeps. It should be abolished to preserve the mental health of those involved.

The institution of monarchy directly turned Elizabeth into a bad mother. As Anthony Jay, who scripted the documentary Elizabeth R, explains: "She's one of those people who is deeply unemotional. . . . For people who are emotionally detached in that way, institutions become more important than families. The Queen's children were handed over to nannies, and a kind of emotional cauterisation took place. Something was sealed off very early. For her, that is a strength. If she were emotionally involved, she couldn't do her job."

Some would argue that her job is some compensation. While it is true that she enjoys considerable and real powers, Neil Kinnock - who as leader of the opposition for over a decade saw Elizabeth's work at close hand - gives us a sense of how mind-numbingly boring this work is. He observed that "the great skill the Queen has acquired over the years is to use the word 'fascinating' in about five different tones . . . . What she's developed over the years is the technique of giving evidence of really rapt interest and attention, whilst at the same time being able to slip her mind into neutral."

It is a horrible and miserable existence. Too emotionally crippled to form relationships with her own children, too infused with the arid notion of "duty" to question a marriage that is widely believed to be unsatisfactory, too numbed with boredom to rebel. When I look at Elizabeth Windsor during her golden jubilee celebrations I won't feel pride, nor even red-blooded republican hatred. I will feel nothing but pity.

Johann's Hari's book, God Save the Queen? Monarchy and the Truth about the Windsors, is newly published by Icon Books (£5.99)

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