Picture: BBC/Reuters

Here are three dictionary definitions of the adjective unprecedented:

Never done or known before…

Never having happened or existed in the past…

If something is unprecedented, it has never happened before…

You don’t have to be Susie Dent to know that the first definition is the only one you need. Shorter is always better.

It is fair to say that the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor led to unprecedented use of the word unprecedented.

This is understandable up to a point, but something happens whenever I hear the same word repeated in the headlines. First, I think, oh, here they go again. Then, I think, oh stop that now, please. Has a memo has gone round or something?

Now it may be true that arresting demoted princes is something hardly ever known. But too many reporters and journalists were masticating on that unchewable word.

Anyway, as you might have spotted, Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested last week in Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office. This dates to his time as a trade envoy, a roll that collapsed under a pile of tabloid headlines.

He denies all wrongdoing and, in common with anyone else, should be presumed to be innocent unless or until facts determine otherwise.

Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on his 66th birthday. All the sixes, clickety click, as they say in bingo. The relegated prince probably knows nothing about bingo, but then neither do I.

What I do know is that taking pleasure in the misfortune of others isn’t always kind or nice. Then again, you’d have to be the most ardent, the most myopic, royalist to feel much sympathy for Andew Mountbatten-Windsor; wouldn’t you?

When younger I always thought we should not have a Royal Family. Then I gave up worrying about that, having concluded that we were stuck with them, for better or worse. And Mountbatten-Windsor certainly ticks the box marked ‘worse’.

Whatever now happens, he illustrates the perils of entitlement – and also the opacity of royal wealth.

Both are captured in the £12 million the late Queen Elizabeth is believed to have shelled out to settle a civil suit brought by Virginia Giuffre, who said that at 17 she’d been forced to sexually service certain men, and also alleged that she’d been trafficked to Mountbatten-Windsor. He has always denied any wrongdoing. The suit was still settled. This might strike you as odd. Or just as what is done by people with vast amounts of money at their fingertips (or their mother’s fingertips).

The most striking aspect of this story lies in a picture taken by the Reuters photo-journalist Phil Noble. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor could have been taken to any one of 20 police stations in Norfolk, but Noble had a tip-off about the one thought most likely, which was in the market town of Aylsham. He is said to have waited for hours, headed pictureless to his hotel, then dashed back when informed the car was coming.

He told the Guardian newspaper that he took six images. Two were blank, two just showed police in the front seats. One was out of focus. But the final frame went around the world in an instant.

The former prince, once so often seen giving off an oddly meaty sort of matiness, slumps in the back seat, as if wishing to disappear into his double chin. His eyes are red from the flashlight. His fingers are threaded. He looks haunted.

Such snatched images used sometimes to suggest illicit glamour, a Hollywood star whisked away in a limousine with someone unexpected. Also, such grabbed images sometimes show suspects arriving at court in police vans. Capturing anything clear or coherent under such conditions is a game of photographic chance.

“The photo gods were on my side,” Phil Noble said.

His picture is worth a thousand words. Especially if any of them are ‘unprecedented’.

As for the dethroned prince, perhaps the way he turned out is what happens when royals are feted and treated as special and above ordinary humanity and yet given nothing much useful to do, then given a pointless playboy role.

To fill a vacuum with entitlement, money and arrogance is only asking for trouble. And that’s what King Charles now has. But then the trouble with Andy has been with him for life.

“They have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation,” the King said of the police after the arrest of his brother.

Sibling rivalry on an upper level.