HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: Only Andrew, just Sarah and a teenage 'nobody' who rewrote royal history.

When Prince Andrew met Virginia Guiffre for the first time, he was asked to guess her age.

She was 17. He got it right.

"My daughters are just a little younger than you," he said, by way of explaining his accuracy.

Later that night, Guiffre writes, they had sex.

Prince Andrew has always denied that this day ever happened. He paid Virginia Guiffre a large sum of money to make her stop saying that it did. He embarrassed himself in front of a global TV audience insisting that the photographic evidence of it was faked.

But Virginia Guiffre never did stop saying it. Even after her death, she's still saying it, and a lot more, in the memoir that has, ultimately, brought us to today.

The day Prince Andrew is no longer a prince at all.

Now, he is just Andrew.

Prince Andrew is no longer a prince at all. Image: Getty.

The bravery of one young woman — a nobody in the eyes of the powerful men who abused her — has made history. A disgraced prince now fully cast out — stripped of his title, ejected from his home, shunned by his family and his country.

The alleged meeting between the then-royal and the teenager happened 24 years ago. In her posthumous memoir, Nobody's Girl, Guiffre says she was served to Andrew twice more, including at an "orgy" on the infamous private island of paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, that involved up to eight other young women of unreported ages.

In the two decades that have passed since these meetings (that never occurred, according to Andrew), the world has changed in a way that a privileged prince — a man used to a curtsey and bow every time he is encountered — cannot understand.

He was protected, for the longest time, by his mother, Queen Elizabeth, who doted on her charmless son, ironically finding him less trouble than her tortured and moody first-born, Charles.

And he was protected by the very fact he was the Spare. Who cared that "Randy Andy", as the tabloids called him in the 1980s, was purposeless and partying? Nothing much was expected of the one who wouldn't be king.

And he was protected by the powerful friends who would transport him from the draughty palaces of England to their yachts and villas and yes, private islands. A sparkly world with dark edges, where everyone is invested in keeping each other's secrets. Slowly, and then all at once, those protections fell away.

The Epstein files won't stay closed.

Andrew and Virginia Guiffre. Image: Getty.

Pesky reporters won't stop digging up emails and letters from Andrew and his wife, Sarah Ferguson, exposing them as people who lied about their proximity to a jailed paedophile, and who will sell royal access to the highest bidders.

The Queen died, leaving big brother Charles with a desperate mission to win public support for a faltering, dated institution. A mission that is undermined every time another icky piece of dirt about little brother Andrew floats up to the surface.

Andrew and Sarah had been harboured and protected by people who had more status and more money than they did, until they finally became a liability far too big to bear.

Now Andrew is friendless, and none of his powerful allies will protect him any longer.

Not his brother who this week was heckled in the street in one of those moments that illustrated the pressure to keep Andrew's dirt from staining the King's royal robes had become impossible to bear.

Not his sisters in law, the Queen, and Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh, who could no longer wear the hypocrisy of appearing at events supporting victims of sexual abuse and then sit next to Andrew in a chapel at Christmas.

Not his nephew, William who will be King soon, and whose cool disgust towards his uncle has been on clear display for years.

Jeffrey Epstein, of course, is dead. He was a man who lent Andrew and his wife money. And houses. And took them on holidays. And attended their parties, as they attended his. Was there a photo that dripped with ugly privilege more than the one resurfaced this week of Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in fancy dress at a palace party for Princess Beatrice's 18th birthday?

Which brings us to the Princesses.

Until today, Andrew was trying to negotiate two new royal homes for himself and his ex-wife. He and Sarah had been living in separate wings of the 30-room Royal Lodge on the grounds of Windsor Castle and were desperate to hold onto it, or move to get two smaller 'cottages'.

Listen to Mamamia Out Loud, where we discuss Prince Andrew. Post continues below.

The King, belatedly and reportedly under great pressure from William, who does not want to inherit any of this mess, found a backbone and said no.

So Andrew's off to live in one of his brother's privately-owned homes, where the taxpayers are not forking out for his butler and his wifi. Ferguson is finally out on her own too, her title removed, any royal pocket money withdrawn.

But Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie are still royals, and their real-estate situation will come under increasing scrutiny next, as will everything about their lives.

The sins of their father will come to define them in unfair and unwelcome ways, and they will be considering what moves to make next to draw some lines between them.

Beatrice lives in the Cotswolds, in a sprawling farmhouse bought privately. Eugenie lives half the year by the sea in Portugal, and half the year in an apartment in Kensington Palace. They're both married to wealthy men in property, which might be about to come in handy. They're both mothers now, and they sometimes have a podcast, of course.

They're both closer to Prince Harry than William. And given that Prince Harry learned today that birthright titles can be removed, we can imagine the Eugenie-Harry group chat has been active.

A different world, indeed, to the one Andrew thought he was living in, 24 years ago, when it would have been unthinkable that he would ever not be a Prince. That he would ever not stand beside his brother, in front of curtseying subjects. And that a 17-year-old girl's account of events he insists he can not recollect could change absolutely everything.

Image: Getty.