Pizza Express jokes flood social media after Prince Andrew settlement

News of Prince Andrew's settlement has triggered a new wave of Pizza Express jokes.

The Duke of York has agreed to pay an undisclosed sum as part of the settlement with Virginia Giuffre and accepted she had suffered as a victim of abuse.

He made no admission of liability and has always denied the allegations that he sexually assaulted her on three occasions when she was 17. He also said he regretted his association with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and agreed to make a donation to Giuffre's charity in support of victims' rights.

A key pillar of Andrew's defence has been that he couldn’t have met Giuffre on the night she said they danced in a private member's club - 10th March 2001 - because “I had taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party.”

He became an instant meme when he claimed he had chowed down in the high street chain in a 2019 interview with the BBC's Emily Maitlis.

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When pressed on why he remembered the occasion with such specificity, he added it was an “unusual thing for me to do” and that he had only been to Woking a couple of times.

Since then, every time he has been in the news people have joked about the restaurant and brought up other bizarre things he said in that infamous interview, like his claim he had a medical condition that prevented him from sweating.

In light of the settlement, then, the memes came flooding in anew, with many people joking that so-called trip to Pizza Express was turning out to be pretty expensive indeed:

Buckingham Palace refused to comment on the settlement or who would fund it when approached by The Independent yesterday.

“We have never commented on the funding of the duke’s legal matters and won’t be now,” a palace spokesperson told The Independent.

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