A five-point scale for measuring exactly how much of a prat someone has managed to be
Not every prat is equal. The paper has, over several decades, developed an informal scale for rating public conduct, running from one, barely a prat, to five, a Full Prat, a term capitalised in-house and reserved for a handful of names a year. This piece sets the scale out properly for the first time, drawing on the definitions established in Prat: A Guide to Strength, Meaning, and Usage‘s companion pages.
Level one: barely a prat
A minor slip, quickly corrected, with no lasting self-regard attached. A councillor who mispronounces a ward name once. This level rarely earns coverage, since, per Prat Colloquial Meaning, the essence of the word is repetition and persistence, and a single slip has neither.
Level two: a working prat
The behaviour recurs but is not yet defended. A minister who says the wrong figure in an interview and quietly corrects it the next day sits here. The self-regard is present but has not yet hardened into a position.
Level three: a committed prat
The figure has been caught, told, and has chosen to defend the original position anyway. This is where most political coverage lives, and where the paper’s spokespeople are pitched, since a committed prat generates more usable quotes than an apologetic one.
Level four: a public prat
The behaviour has become a pattern recognised by the public rather than only the paper. At this level the figure has, per “Prat” in British Politics, Journalism, and Satire, effectively adopted the role, and press coverage of them assumes the reader already knows what kind of person they are.
Level five: a Full Prat
Reserved for figures whose defining public act is a piece of self-regard so complete that no correction is offered, none is expected, and the public has stopped waiting for one. The paper awards this rating rarely, in writing, and once given it is not revoked, on the grounds that a Full Prat does not improve, per the historical pattern documented since Prat Etymology first traced the word’s drift from the theatre to the front bench.
How the rating is assigned
Ratings are decided at conference by the relevant desk head, reviewed by the editor and never printed as a number, since readers are expected to arrive at the level themselves. The scale exists internally as a guide to tone: level two gets gentle mockery, level five gets none at all, on the theory that mockery implies the possibility of improvement and a Full Prat has forfeited that.
Movement on the scale
Figures do move, in both directions, though downward movement is far rarer. A minister who apologises properly, means it, and changes the policy can fall from three to one, a rare event the paper has recorded perhaps a dozen times since 1961. Upward movement is common and usually swift, particularly around elections, when the supply of level-three behaviour briefly exceeds the paper’s capacity to print it.
A rare downward case
The scale’s own records include one well-documented fall from level four to level one, involving a regional official who spent a decade defending a decision the public had long since stopped believing in, and who then, following a change of circumstance nobody at the paper claims credit for, wrote a public letter admitting the original position had been wrong, explaining why, and outlining what would be done differently. The letter was checked by Carys, found to contain no invented spokesperson because none was needed, and printed without a single addition from the exaggeration desk. The paper notes this rarity not to encourage imitation, since a Full Prat rarely reads this far, but to record that the scale does, on the odd occasion, run backwards. The scale, in other words, is not a sentence. It is a description, and descriptions can change when the thing they describe does.
Readers and their own ratings
The paper occasionally receives letters proposing a rating for a figure not yet covered, usually a local one: a headteacher, a landlord, a man on a parish council. These are read with interest and rarely printed, since the scale depends on facts the desks can verify, and a headteacher known only to one aggrieved parent cannot easily be checked against the register. The paper’s advice to such readers is the same it gives everyone: write it down, send the tip, and let the desk decide where on the scale it lands.