The saga of Andrew Windsor, the ex-Duke, who henceforth will only be known as plain old Prince, may have finally reached its end. At least the rest of the Royal family will hope so. But even that is likely to depend on what may further emerge from any more releases of Epstein files, letters, records and emails in the US. His image, such as it remains, may yet be tarnished further.

It is the loss of titles that will certainly hurt him most. Andrew has not formally lost them – removal of his dukedom requires an act of parliament, which neither government nor Buckingham Palace will want, taking up as it would embarrassingly public lengths of time – and he can’t shed his princely tag since he indubitably is the son of a monarch.

But he won’t be able to use them publicly or privately and that will be a terrible blow to his sense of entitlement and status. As one of his former dates told Andrew Lownie for his recent book, Entitled, he always introduced himself to her friends as the Duke of York, saying: “It struck me how impressed he was with who he is, or how impressed he wanted others to be. Every joke always ended with: ‘because I’m the Duke of York’. He tells the most pathetic jokes. He finds poo cushions funny.”

Friday night’s statement represented the last shred of dignity in that he was allowed to pretend that he was relinquishing the use of his titles and the knighthood of the garter voluntarily, out of a belated sense of duty. He wasn’t. After at least 10 years of private wrangling among the family and personal anguish on the part of the king about what to do about the Andrew problem, and with his mother no longer around to protect him and pay his debts, there was no alternative but to cut him loose. Evidently Prince William was prepared to be more ruthless than his father. In the end it was the Windsors’ genteel version of the revolver in the locked room with a bottle of whisky.

He still has the Royal Lodge, where he lives with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, (what does he need a place that big for? It’s not as if he has that many friends) and apparently spends his days watching golf on the television and taking solitary rides in Windsor Great Park.

While the family firm can’t stop him going to church – as he did in attending Westminster Cathedral a few weeks ago for the funeral of the Duchess of Kent, when William ostentatiously ignored him – he won’t be accompanying the rest of the family to church at Sandringham on Christmas morning. Instead it will be a lonely lunch at home with plain Ms Sarah Ferguson and their daughters (who retain their princess titles) and their families. The paper hats will be the nearest the eighth in line will ever come to a crown now. He will have to watch the next coronation on television as well, if he lives that long.

What will he do for money? No longer a working royal, he hasn’t qualified for public funds for the last six years. There are residual savings from the sale of various properties, he still has a Navy pension and presumably there will have to be private subventions from the king. Famously profligate, he and his ex-wife lacked the means to keep up with the Arab and American billionaires with whom they liked to mingle. This must have been one of the reasons he was attracted to Epstein, though the sex – which he still denies – was probably another. What he offered them pathetically in return was status and access to flummery and palaces.

Now he does not even have that, locked as he is, like Mr Rochester’s first wife in the attic, in his case the 30-room Royal Lodge: nowhere to go, no one willing to see him. Poor Virginia Giuffre, whose own memoirs come out next week after their serialisation in the Guardian, has been denied the satisfaction of finally bringing down a prince while alive.

He was an idiot, and worse: a powerful man who brought pain to others: a dark stain tarnishing the family escutcheon and rocking the institution itself.

• Stephen Bates is a former royal correspondent of the Guardian