The power of the monarch was meant to be on show last week when royal attendants took down a banner in Windsor Castle that bore the coat of arms of Prince Andrew, a man who has brought more disgrace to the royal family than anyone in generations. But the removal of the banner carried no real sanction.

King Charles had merely arranged a minor symbolic change. Rather than demonstrating his total rejection of his brother’s past misconduct, he invited a shrug and a simple question. Is that it?

Now we know the answer. The King has heard the public doubts about whether he understood the gravity of this scandal. He has cut Andrew adrift from the monarchy. The prince becomes a private citizen: Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. He will be part of the family, but no longer a prince or a duke. In practical terms, he will not be a member of the royal family at all.

This drastic change goes beyond some of the options aired over the past two weeks, when it became obvious that it was simply not good enough to demote Andrew by arranging for him to give up the use of his title as Duke of York while allowing him to be called a prince. This goes further: on the monarch’s order, he will no longer be a prince.

Andrew will be exiled to a country house in Sandringham. His fall is astonishing and unprecedented. He was second in line to the throne from the moment he was born, raised in privilege and lauded as a war hero at the age of 22. He had wealth, women and fame. His descent into scandal has been a long journey to humiliation.

This had to happen. The King had to shield the monarchy from Andrew. The prince connected the royal family to Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted paedophile, and Ghislaine Maxwell, a criminal who trafficked girls for sex.

Worse, Andrew stood accused of assaulting Virginia Roberts Giuffre when she was 17 and working for Epstein. The claim has been levelled at him for more than a decade, yet he offered shifting accounts of his behaviour and made claims that were later contradicted by his own emails. Could anyone believe him?

The danger for the King and the royal family was significant. The voluntary arrangement on October 17, symbolic but not substantial, meant the angst over Andrew might never end. It might be passed to Prince William to make a decisive breach with the prince at some point in the future. Better to deal with it now.

In any case, the public argument over Prince Andrew was no longer about a prominent man who settled a sexual abuse claim out of court. It was about whether the King fully registered the public mood. And how he might wield the power of the modern monarchy.

The King conveys calm and goodwill in his public remarks. During his visit to Australia last year, he spoke eloquently in parliament of the value of peace, justice and mutual respect. But he was silent on this scandal.

There have been movies made about a king’s speech. This new drama was about a king’s silence. With the palace’s statement on Thursday night in London – issued at 6am on Friday AEDT – there was a clear repudiation of the abuse practised by Epstein and Maxwell.

This part of the statement came from Queen Camilla as well as King Charles: “Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.” Nothing in the statement admitted any guilt on Andrew’s part. Importantly, the sympathy in the statement was for the victims, not for the man who is losing his dukedom.

Ultimately, this was a moral question about how the head of state would address past wrongs. Even so, he had to act with care.

The case against Andrew has never been heard in court, of course. He never testified; no jury weighed the evidence; no judge ruled on his culpability. Giuffre said she was forced to have sex with him on three occasions, the first in March 2001 when she was 17. She lodged a civil claim for sexual assault in August 2021 and a US judge rejected his attempt to have the case thrown out. Andrew settled out of court in February 2022, months before it was due to go to trial. The payment to Giuffre was said to be worth millions of pounds.

Andrew had been tarnished long before he settled the case. The infamous photograph of the prince and the teenager, taken on her camera in March 2001, first emerged in 2011 after the Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid, paid her for the right to publish it. The result was catastrophic for Andrew after he had been seen with Epstein in New York only months earlier.

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Andrew paid a penalty, of sorts, long before he paid Giuffre. He stepped down as British trade envoy in July 2011 and, in doing so, lost a cushy role that helped him fly on private jets at public expense while networking with leaders from Tunisia to Kazakhstan. He was stamped forever by his association with Epstein, who by this time was a known felon who had served time in prison for soliciting a minor for sex.

In truth, however, the penalty was small. Buckingham Palace shielded Andrew from the worst of the aftermath. Within a few years, he was launching new ways to network with the wealthy. One of them, Pitch@Palace, saw him travelling to Australia and other countries to connect small companies with big investors. He conducted business from Buckingham Palace and used St James’ Palace for gala events.

The treatment of the prince, said to be Queen Elizabeth’s favourite son, displayed a pattern of gentle and symbolic reproof after each revelation. This explained the impatience over the past two weeks: why trust Buckingham Palace to act now, when it had done too little then? The changes on October 17 followed the usual pattern of symbolic change without real pain.

There was a case for caution. Charles Moore, a former editor of Britain’s Daily Telegraph and now a columnist for the newspaper, wrote on Monday about the need for restraint in doing anything further against Andrew.

“Given the extent to which he has discredited himself in various ways, it is right that he should no longer use his titles, but it would be wrong that he should be stripped of them without proof of iniquity,” he wrote. Others complained about the “pile-on” against the prince.

While these were legitimate concerns, Andrew did not help himself or his defenders with his own conduct.

Whatever your opinion about his relationship with Giuffre, he failed on two fronts during the years after they met and he faced claims of the most appalling behaviour.

The first was that he was loose with the truth. His initial response to Giuffre’s claims was that he had never met her. Her account, in legal testimony over the past decade as well as in her memoir, is specific about their meetings. Had he really never met her at all?

On this point, new voices emerged. Another young woman who worked for Epstein, Johanna Sjoberg, testified that she was with Giuffre and Andrew in Epstein’s New York townhouse in 2001. They were playing with a puppet of the prince while Epstein and Maxwell set up a photograph. “I sat on Andrew’s lap, and they put the puppet’s hand on Virginia’s breast, and Andrew put his hand on my breast, and they took a photo,” said Sjoberg in a witness statement in 2016.

Sjoberg’s statement, made when Giuffre lodged a defamation claim against Maxwell, only emerged publicly eight years later.

When Andrew sat down for an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight program in 2019, he said he had broken off contact with Epstein at the end of 2010 when they were photographed together in New York. In fact, emails released in recent weeks showed Andrew was emailing his old friend in 2011.

Andrew was caught out. The host who conducted the Newsnight interview, Emily Maitlis, reviewed what has emerged – and she concluded that Andrew lied.

This only increased the problem for the King and the pressure for action. Buckingham Palace had defended Andrew for years, yet some of the assertions were now in tatters.

Andrew failed on a second front. He said he would help the survivors of sexual abuse. This was part of his statement in November 2019, when he stepped back from royal duties. There’s no sign he made any effort to do so.

The British were divided on how Charles was responding to this scandal. Had he done enough? When polling firm YouGov asked 4223 adults their views this week, 40 per cent said he was handling it well. Another 32 per cent said he was handling it badly, while the rest were unsure. This was a response to the moves on October 17 – and before the dramatic changes on Thursday night.

Given those results, the public will probably welcome the new and very concrete changes to Andrew’s position. The prince was already toxic: in August, before the latest revelations, YouGov found that 67 per cent of people backed the idea of removing his titles.

There were suspicions, also, that more would emerge about Andrew’s connections to foreign investors, including some who were being described as Chinese spies. Andrew Lownie, the author of a new and damning biography of the former prince – Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York – was convinced that Andrew’s business dealings would be his undoing.

There was always a moral case for action by the King to protect the monarchy. Laura Clancy, a lecturer at Lancaster University and a researcher on the cultural politics of the monarchy, said this week that the public expected the royal family to uphold a standard of behaviour. Clancy is the author of What is the Monarchy For?, published by Bristol University Press earlier this year.

“For many years, the monarchy seems to have tried to shield Andrew from public view,” she said. “But the latest claims, and the extent of public feeling about them, mean the monarchy knows it has to act and do more.” Days later, it did exactly that.

There may still be a case for the King to go further. “The King could speak out and acknowledge the concerns of the public around his brother’s friendship with Epstein, at the very least, and acknowledge it was ill-advised,” Anna Whitelock, a professor of the history of modern monarchy at City St George’s, University of London, said.

She put her view to this masthead before Buckingham Palace issued the dramatic decisions at the end of the week. She made a prescient point about the King: “He could also focus attention on the victims.” The statement from the palace sought do to this, albeit only in a few words. Who knows if Charles or Camilla will ever say more?

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The King had to act. The symbolic changes two weeks ago were seen as inadequate – and the damage to the monarchy would continue if the public could not trust the King to understand the need for substantial change.

This was a family scandal that reflected on the House of Windsor. It was not a task for the government or the parliament. It was for the head of the family to fix. And he has fixed it in the most dramatic way, sending his brother into exile.