This is the outcome that, ultimately, King Charles and the Prince of Wales would have hoped for: Andrew, the subject of so many toxic headlines unhelpful to the royal family and institution of monarchy, finally doing the “honourable” thing.

It has been six long years since his disastrous Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis precipitated the start of this very public fall from grace.

Its immediate aftermath saw him step back from public duties “for the foreseeable future”. His HRH style was put in abeyance, and he was stripped of all his military and charity patronages.

The humiliation, then, will have been hard for a man who so clearly cherishes his status. Now it is complete.

He has always clung stubbornly to his dukedom, a gift from his mother on the morning of his wedding in 1986, along with the titles the Earl of Inverness and Baron Killyleagh. And to his prestigious Garter role as Royal Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter. He will no longer use any of them, with immediate effect.

And he has always, including in Friday’s statement agreeing to put them in abeyance, vehemently denied the allegations against him. He maintains he did not have sex with his accuser, Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Epstein who died in April by suicide aged 41, and whom he claimed he had never met yet paid millions to in order to settle a civil sexual assault case.

The headlines will not go away. With each one, the risk of reputational damage to the monarchy is graver. Behind the walls of Buckingham Palace, it has been decided, enough is enough.

Andrew’s acceptance of his fate comes on the eve of the posthumous publication of Giuffre’s memoir, due out next week, exclusive extracts from which have been published by the Guardian this week. More unwelcome coverage was, perhaps, inevitable. Certainly palace aides would have feared so.

Charles is due to make a historic visit to the Holy See next week, when he will become the first English monarch since Henry VIII split with Rome in 1534 to pray publicly with the pope and head of the Catholic church. The king will not have wanted coverage of that occasion to be overshadowed by yet more vocal cries for Andrew to relinquish his titles.

Pressure has clearly been ramped up by other senior royals on the eighth in line to the throne.

It was a bad week in which Andrew found himself linked to the collapsed China spy case when it emerged he had held meetings with Cai Qi, the member of China’s politburo at the centre of the spy scandal. They had met on at least three occasions between 2018 and 2019, and the prince had invited him to Buckingham Palace for lunch in 2018.

The week had begun with leaked emails allegedly showing that far from cutting off contact with Epstein in December 2010, as he had claimed in his 2019 Newsnight interview with Maitlis, he was apparently in touch with the disgraced US financier in February 2011.

The emails purported to show Andrew messaging Epstein on publication of that famous photograph of the prince with his arm around Giuffre, saying that they were “in this together”.

Friday’s statement presents this as Andrew’s decision, yet it would certainly have been made by the palace. Charles will not have relished taking the drastic step of forcibly removing the dukedom. The last time a dukedom was taken away from a senior royal was more than 100 years ago, according to the historian Anthony Seldon, who told the BBC: “That was in 1919, when Prince Charles Edward – one of Queen Victoria’s grandsons – lost the title of Duke of Albany for fighting on the German side during World War One.”

It would also have required an act of parliament.

Andrew is also a brother: a brother Charles has hitherto loyally included in family occasions, though Andrew will not be present at the royal family’s Christmas celebrations this year.

The prince’s continued obduracy over doing the “honourable” thing will have saddened and frustrated the king, who seems to have finally grasped the nettle and found a way to persuade his sibling this is in the family and the monarchy’s best interests.

So what is left for the son of the late Queen Elizabeth? He remains a prince and eighth in the line of succession. He is also still theoretically a counsellor of state – a stand-in for the king if he’s overseas or unwell. It is only theoretical, because as a non-working royal the palace has already made clear he would never be asked. As with many of his titles, it’s classed as “inactive”.

But all the other vestiges of his once senior royal role are now no more.