Victoria Derbyshire drops Andrew Mountbatten Windsor bombshell as inquiry launched
Newsnight has revisited Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s Pizza Express claims (Image: Getty)
BBC Newsnight has revealed fresh insights into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s Pizza Express claims. Taking to X on Monday, journalist Victoria Derbyshire announced that the programme had learned of an internal inquiry launched by the restaurant chain in response to the former Prince’s claims.
According to Derbyshire, Pizza Express “found no evidence to suggest Mountbatten-Windsor had visited and was telling the truth – and also nothing to suggest he was not”. In addition, the presenter confirmed that Newsnight had “made extensive inquiries to see if there’s any record of any customer or any staff member” seeing Andrew on March 10, 2001, but had found “none”.
In a TV interview that well and truly shocked the world, the then-Prince Andrew joined Emily Maitlis on Newsnight to discuss his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Asked about the day on which he’d allegedly slept with Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, the former Duke of York noted that he couldn’t recall meeting Giuffre on the date in question, considering that he’d spent it at Pizza Express in Woking.
“I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party,” he said, adding that he remembered the events of that day clearly because “going to Pizza Express in Woking is an unusual thing for me to do”.
The former Prince spoke about his alleged Pizza Express trip in 2019 (Image: Getty)
While Newsnight has been unable to verify whether or not Andrew had been in attendance in March 2001, the programme said that it had “submitted FOI requests to the Met Police asking if royal protection officers had accompanied Andrew to Pizza Express on that date 25 years ago.”
According to Derbyshire, however, “They told us: ‘Confirming or denying that information is held, would reveal whether protection had been afforded to a specific individual other than the King and the prime minister’. That’s despite the Met previously referring to Andrew’s royal protection officers – including in a press statement in Feb this year.”
