There is further pressure on those in Buckingham Palace tonight as it is revealed that the woman who has made several allegations against Prince Andrew has conducted her own BBC interview.
According to Tuesday’s Daily Mirror, Virginia Roberts Giuffre has spoken to BBC Panorama – the same programme which featured Princess Diana’s world famous interview in 1995 with Martin Bashir.
The Mirror reports, however, that Ms Roberts Giuffre is angered that her interview has not yet been aired, despite it being filmed three weeks before the Duke of York’s Newsnight appearance.
Suggestions have been made that Ms Roberts Giuffre’s interview had been pushed back, so not to jeopardise Andrew’s planned broadcast.
Sources close to the BBC told the paper that the Panorama programme has not yet been aired because it forms “part of a larger investigation.”
This will no doubt concern Buckingham Palace who had hoped to draw a line under the allegations made against the Duke by Ms Roberts Giuffre.
She alleges that she met the Duke at London club Tramp before sleeping with him in Belgravia on 10th March 2001.
When this was put to him, Prince Andrew said: “That couldn’t have happened because the date being suggested — the 10th of March — I was at home with the children.
“I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party at about 4 or 5 in the afternoon.
“And then because the Duchess was away, we have a simple rule in the family that when one is away the other is there.”
Interviewer Emily Maitlis asked the Duke how he could possibly remember something so specific from 18 years ago.
He replied: “Because going to Pizza Express in Woking is a very unusual thing for me to do.
“I’ve never been . . . I’ve only been to Woking a couple of times and I remember it weirdly distinctly. As soon as somebody reminded me of it, I went, ‘Oh yes I remember that’.”
