Comrade Pratt has come a long way since his days selling the communist newspapers on the streets of Glasgow. After graduating from the art college in Glasgow and after a brief career teaching there (all his colleagues missed his charm, dedication and helpfullness)he saw that the only way to get the working class out of eternal bondage was to become a journalist. And so we have it: he has reached the very top of his profession fighting against lies, human misery and nastiness of all sorts as foreign editor of the Sunday Herald.

He has been a foreign correspondent for over twenty years. He loves to tell the tale of when he crossed the porous Hashemite border with unusual documentation and bribed a Somali taxi driver to take him to the Holy city ( what with remains a mystery but Somali taxi drivers are known to be highly priapic individuals - it's the heat you see). Once there he travelled around in the back sections of the public buses dressed as a woman. Forgetting he was dressed as a female, the poor chap got caught short and went into a vast public urinal, not two hundred meters from the Ka' baa itself, which was a gay hangout and packed with cottagers at the time. He was only rescued by the moutawa by accident who, diagnosing a particular form of western degeneracy, packed him back across the border with "Harlot" stamped into his false docs.

He has covered wars in Bosnia, Afghanistan (he once had lovely sweet arabic tea with Usama bin Laden which is a truely heroic thing to do with a background in the CP)Iraq, Israel and Palestine, Haiti, and across Africa, including Liberia, Congo, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Sudan and Somalia. While Foreign Editor of the Sunday Herald, the newspaper has THREE times won the 'Best Foreign Coverage Award' in the Newspaper of the Year Awards.

Follicly challenged from early on, he was a broth of a boy in his youth and still retains a lovely singing voice with which he likes to beguile his friends around the camp fire- a bit like Thesiger without the excessive charm. He actually performs quite without vanity and always has, always has, even when giving speeches to his fellow communists in closed sesssion.


He has also twice been shortlisted as Reporter of the Year in the Scottish Press Awards, for his coverage of Afghanistan and Iraq.


His first book - Intifada: ' The Long Day of Rage' was published in 2006 and is a read comparible to "The seven pillars...."


Fav tv prog: Dad's Army

Fav character: Clive Dunn

Fav author: R L Stevenson "I just love it when Hyde, after a potion, turns into a raving, violent maniac prone to attack anyone around him, be they teaching colleagues, former partner etc. He just loses the plot which makes the book so exciting."

Fav poet: Kipling

Fav food: Kipling cakes

Fav person of all time: "A toss up between Stalin, Mao and Lenin. Lenin probably edges it because he started off the whole killing spree in the first place and was one bloodthirsty bastard."

Fav pastime to relax: Strolling around this wonderful city at night especially when there's a full moon.