Expressing the bleeding obvious

‘I’m a consultant psychiatrist – these are 3 things the Macron ‘shove’ incident reveals,’ ran a headline in the Daily Express this week, as one-time daytime TV mainstay Raj Persaud analysed the eye-catching interaction between the French president and his wife.

Under the byline ‘Raj Persaud – consultant psychiatrist’, the doc offered such insights as how the president appeared “to nurse his mouth area with a hand briefly as he reappears, suggesting he may even have been hurt”, before speculating, as he is younger than his wife, that it indicated “this whole incident transmitted the sense of an adolescent male’s rejection by a more experienced woman”.

The incident, he warned, “was perhaps a sign that the turbulence may be far from over, and the French need to fasten their seatbelts”.

Express readers have grown used to this sort of deep insight from Persaud. Earlier this month, following the Duke of Sussex’s BBC interview, they were treated to ‘I’m a consultant psychiatrist: These are 3 things Prince Harry’s latest outburst reveals’, in which he speculated that the errant royal’s “latest public outpouring was in fact an attempt to send a message to the King and other members of his family”.

“With other avenues of communication apparently cut off – he claimed the King will not take his calls – this was quite possibly a bid to garner attention on the public stage in a manner they simply cannot ignore,” he added.

Back in March, under the headline ‘I’m a consultant psychiatrist: This is what the King’s music reveals about his character’, Persaud noted that Charles had said that music can “comfort us in times of sadness”, prompted him to draw on his years of experience to ask: “This emphasis on how melody affects mood raises the question of whether His Majesty needs cheering up a lot. In which case, has the playlist revealed that he can really get quite low at times?”.

And that itself came just a week after ‘I’m a consultant psychiatrist – here are THREE ways the Ukraine crisis has transformed PM’, under which Persaud used his expertise to scoop every political hack in Britain with his assertion that “as a professional people watcher, I get the sense Starmer may have finally found the cause that makes him feel like a mover and shaker on the world stage”.

Groundbreaking analysis. Or, as Basil Fawlty might have said, stating the bleeding obvious. Next week: I’m a consultant psychiatrist – and I’ll knock out any old rubbish for a few quid!