Andrew's Pizza Express Alibi Is Finally Being Investigated — and It's Not Holding Up

Pizza Express had reportedly tried to find evidence if Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was present at their Woking outlet in 2001 or not.

The Royal Family has attempted many strides to move past the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor controversy. But the large, monstrous shadow of the scandal refuses to leave its tail. In a recent development, the BBC reported that Pizza Express had investigated the disgraced royal’s 2019 claims that he was at the Woking outlet in 2001 and found no evidence that he had, or had not, been there. The outlet's own research reportedly had found no record of anyone seeing him there on the night in 2001. 

Virginia Giuffre had said that on March 10, 2001, she had dined with Mountbatten-Windsor, danced with him at the nightclub, before going to Ghislaine Maxwell’s house in Belgravia in Central London for the night. However, the former Duke of York claimed in his trainwreck BBC Newsnight interview in 2019 that he had been at Pizza Express at “4pm or 5pm in the afternoon” on that particular date before spending the night at home.

According to reports, Newsnight was recently told that the senior management at Pizza Express had looked into the plausibility of Mountbatten-Windsor’s claims as they deemed the matter to be of public interest. After records from 2001 couldn’t be found, past members of staff and local management were spoken to. It is understood that the manager of the Woking outlet in 2001 had left the business and couldn’t be talked to. On the other hand, Newsnight had reportedly tried to find records of any customer or staff member having seen him that night but found no evidence. 

Although the vast majority of the interview was broadcast, a small amount of material was excluded due to time constraints, which involved Mountbatten-Windsor talking more about Pizza Express and claiming that his staff had looked through a diary to get more information. 

“I'd taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking," he said in the interview, as per the BBC. "This has all been worked out by my staff, who've looked at the diary and everything else. The duchess (Sarah Ferguson) was away, I think, United States somewhere. And we had a very simple rule: at that stage, the children had one or other of us for all, most of the, well, as often as we could manage. So if one of us was out, the other one was in. And then occasionally they would have both of us and on this particular occasion, she was away and I was at home.” 

BBC reportedly tried to file a Freedom of Information request with the Metropolitan police, asking if any royal protection officers accompanied Mountbatten-Windsor to the Woking outlet that night in 2001. However, the Met had said it could “neither confirm nor deny” whether they had this data, citing “national security” among other reasons, according to reports.