I’m moving in with my husband, aged 80
At 80, Bake Off’s Prue Leith has moved in with her husband and is busier than ever. By Margarette Driscoll
If you happen across Prue Leith today, please don’t give her any cake. She’s on overload and the new series of The Great British Bake Off hasn’t even started. No, Prue has just celebrated her 80th birthday and for the past few days, people have been popping up with special bakes all over the place, from a lemon mousse extravaganza at her chef ’s academy in South Africa to a homemade effort with eight candles, one for each decade (“No need to create a fire risk,” Prue says) baked by her PA back home in the Cotswolds.
That birthday deserves a double take. Can Paul Hollywood’s colourful sidekick be 80? It certainly seems hard to believe sitting opposite Prue in a hotel bar in Paddington, west London, the day after her birthday. She’s just been finalising some new designs for her jewellery range and is about to publish her latest book, The Vegetarian Kitchen. Though she says she feels a bit hung-over after her birthday dinner, she is all peachy complexion and infectious energy – her outfit alone brightens up the winter gloom.
“I have a very chirpy disposition. It’s nothing to be particularly proud of, it’s just to do with serotonin levels in your brain,” she says. “If you’re a depressed sort of miserable guts, that’s also a chemical thing, it’s not your fault. I’m just lucky, I wake up happy.”
Leith has enjoyed decades of success as a restaurateur and businesswoman and, as time goes by, she seems to get more high-powered. She has a range of brightly coloured spectacles as well as her jewellery line, is the author of eight novels and in 2016 married fashion designer John Playfair (her first husband died in 2002), with whom she is now living for the first time. After spending the last few years with separate abodes – Playfair apparently only popped back to do the laundry – they are now mid-construction of a new, Grand Designs- style house in the Cotswolds. “John’s calling it our ‘eventide’ home,” she laughs.
Sceptics doubted she could replace Mary Berry in the nation’s heart, but Bake Off has made her an icon, too – so much so that her face has been memorialised in pancake form by a former contestant on the show to celebrate Shrove Tuesday (for the recipe, see the GBBO website).
Prue, who grew up in South Africa, says that when she joined the show in 2017 she didn’t realise it was “the nation’s most precious asset”. She found out the hard way when she accidentally tweeted the winner’s name before the end. “What struck me was the heartfelt misery and fury of the punters who felt that I’d ruined their lives,” she says. “Part of me thought ‘That’s excessive, get a life’, but another part of me thought: ‘Poor things, they’ve lived for this moment, the final, and now I’ve f---ed it up.’”
It was her first encounter with the fury of Twitter, which, as the last week has reiterated, can have a devastating impact. Even Prue, who is made of pretty robust stuff, finds it shocking. “If one person says something nice about me, another will say: ‘Don’t forget she’s the b---who tweeted the winner, she’s not to be trusted.’ It’s so tempting to say ‘Haven’t you ever made a mistake in your life?’ but you can’t, because it just gives the story oxygen.
“That’s dangerous,” she continues. “In the more important world, politicians are not wanting to say what they believe because they don’t want half the world to hate them. It’s awful that politicians feel they have to leave the House of Commons because of the way they are trolled. You don’t want anyone to be so flaky that they can’t take a bit of a b------ing in class or a bit of rough stuff in the kitchen, but…” She pauses suddenly, raising her hands in the air. “There we are, if I said that online, people would be accusing me of ‘endorsing bullying’. So, you can’t say anything.”
Politics is close to her heart as her son, Danny Kruger, has just been elected MP for Devizes. Prue is very evidently a proud mama, although she launches straight into a story about him being sacked for saying something out of line. Standing against Tony Blair in Sedgefield in 2005, Kruger suggested public services would benefit from a period of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” (referencing the work of Austrian thinker Joseph Schumpeter, who believed constant change was needed to invigorate economic structures).
“The Guardian published a piece saying: ‘At least there’s one young Tory prepared to admit that he wants to dismantle the NHS,’” she says. “He took this idea of creative destruction and just blew it up – rather like what happens on Twitter – and Michael Howard sacked him overnight. For quoting a philosopher!”
She’s laughing, but must have felt hurt on his behalf. “I was so angry. I wanted to kill Michael Howard,” oward, she recalls. “Danny said, ‘Mum, m, he’s the leader, he can get rid of people eople if he wants to, don’t worry about out it.’” it.’ ”
Even so, Boris Johnson n might be well advised to handle e Kruger with kid gloves, or at least deliver on Prue’s review view of NHS hospital food, which ich will be published later this is year. She has been acting g as an adviser to a panel of experts looking at whether hospitals should employ chefs and use fresh produce, rather than reheating factory-made food.
Prue and the Prime Minister discussed the review over breakfast in the Downing Street garden just after the election. They know one another as she sometimes wrote for him when he was editor of The Spectator. She found him very amusing and good company.
“Funnily enough, I think he is the prime minister we need right now, someone enormously cheerful and confident to pull us all along. Even if it is over a cliff, at least he’ll be pulling, not just standing there saying: ‘Well, shall we jump?’”
The Vegetarian Kitchen is written with her niece Peta Leith, a former pastry chef at The Ivy, but far from jumping on the veggie bandwagon, Prue published her first book of vegetarian recipes 26 years ago. “Of course, then my publishers said if we have the word ‘vegetarian’ in the title we won’t sell a single copy. So we called it Contemporary Cooking.”
In 1970, her brother James married Penny Junor, author of numerous books on the Royal family, who was vegetarian (now vegan). Their four children were also vegetarian so, way before the rest of us, Prue was serving up plant-based meals at family get-togethers. “My restaurant, Leith’s, was one of the first to have a vegetarian menu because of Penny. I wondered why she ate whatever the waiter recommended, rather than looking at a menu, and she said, ‘ ‘Because I don’t like see seeing the vegetarian opti option on the same page as liver or baby suckling pig.’ That never occurred to me.” Pr Prue doesn’t think she’ll ever be completely veggie, but ““it’s a very underrated aspec aspect of our larder. Carniv Carnivores always put the meat fi first, then tack on a bit of brocco broccoli and a potato, but you can ge get very rich, satisfying and su surprising dishes out of things like aubergines and peppers. You just have to take the trouble to cook vegetables, not just boil them and put some butter on the top.”
The big question mark over Bake Off is the replacement for Sandi Toksvig, who proved a perfect foil to Noel Fielding, her co-presenter. “Everybody’s holding on tight because Sandi was so wonderful,” says Prue. “All I know is that it won’t be anyone Noel doesn’t approve of.”
Though she’s determined to go easy on the cake for a while, she is looking forward to stepping back into the big tent. “I think I have just the right degree of fame,” she muses. “I would hate it if I couldn’t go to the supermarket, but I like it when people want selfies. I’m such an egotist, I enjoy all the attention.”
If one person says a nice thing about me, another will say: ‘Don’t forget she’s the b---- who tweeted the winner’