Andy’s clocked up 100,000 miles more

DESPITE stepping down as a trade envoy in 2011, Prince Andrew has not lost his love of foreign travel. For I can reveal that, as 2017 draws to a close, ‘Air Miles Andy’ has notched up no fewer than 11 overseas trips — almost doubling the six he managed in 2016.

He has clocked up 100,000 miles this year, according to his official engagements as recorded in the Court Circular. The Duke’s itinerary has taken in Mexico and Monaco, Thailand and Australia, China and the U.S., as well as Canada, Turkey and Singapore.

The full cost will not be known until publication of the Royal Household Financial Statement next June, but the bill for just four of his trips last year — to Malaysia, Turkey, Mozambique and Botswana — amounted to £115,291.

A Palace spokesman says that Andrew travelled to Turkey, Singapore and Thailand at the request of the Foreign Office, while his jaunts to China, the U.S., Australia and Mexico were in connection with Pitch@Palace, the organisation he established to aid entrepreneurs. It is funded by global companies such as KPMG and Standard Chartered Bank.

‘Costs were met by the Pitch@ Palace global organisation,’ explains the spokesman, adding that the Duke travelled to Oman and Monaco in his role as chairman of trustees of Outward Bound.

The costs of those trips were ‘met privately’, as was the Duke’s return to Lakefield College School, Ontario, the exclusive Canadian public school where he spent six months in 1977 as an exchange pupil from Gordonstoun, and of whose foundation trustees he is now chairman.

Andrew, 57, was obliged to stand down as Britain’s trade envoy following criticism of his friendship with American financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and of the cost of his globe-trotting trips.