By rights, Prue Leith wouldn’t be having lunch with me in the Cotswolds. She would be on stage in Las Vegas or Miami Beach performing her one-woman show (suitably titled Nothing in Moderation). She did more than 30 sold-out dates in theatres in the UK earlier this year, and the plan was to do something similar in the States this autumn. She is not sure whether her US promoter got distracted or got cold feet, but she is sanguine about a change of plans. She has enjoyed a couple of rare unscheduled weeks at home instead. And no doubt, she suggests, another promoter can be found.
Leith inhabits a world where, at 83, the show will certainly go on. “The thing is,” she says, smiling at the idea, “in America, they can’t really escape me. Bake Off is very popular, and I also do their version, The Great American Baking Show. It’s funny,” she suggests, “in Britain, I don’t really notice people nudging each other when I walk in the street, though my husband says they do, but in New York, they don’t stand on ceremony, everyone just comes up to me …”
I hardly need to ask which approach she prefers.
“I did a trial show in LA,” she says, “and the audience was all whooping and shouting ‘We love you Prue!’ I mean, who doesn’t want to hear that?”
We’re at a pub called the Fox, not far from where she has lived for nearly 50 years, in the village of Oddington, in Oxfordshire. The pub has lately been renovated by another neighbour, the Bamford family, the bulldozing force behind JCB and the Daylesford Farm organic food operation. Leith says she preferred the previous incarnation, which was a bit more muddy-boots-welcome, but food-wise at least, “the Bamfords have forced everyone around here to jack up their game a bit”.
In her primary coloured top and matching specs, she is a welcome splash of poster paint in the Farrow and Balled conservatory. She sips a low-alcohol negroni, orders a half-pint of prawns for us as a starter – “messy and sharing is good” – and recommends the pizzas. In a phrase that seasons her conversation and her life, she suggests she was “so enormously lucky” to move here well in advance of Jeremy Clarkson and the “Chipping Norton set”.
She and her first husband, Rayne Kruger, relocated in the mid-1970s, when their two children were small and her eponymous restaurant in Notting Hill was no longer a 24/7 commitment. “In those days, this part of the Cotswolds was valued on its land, and the land was hard to farm.” They bought a “house with nine bedrooms, two cottages and an adjacent farm with 150 acres for about £80,000”. A few years ago, with her second husband John Playfair (Kruger, who had been the husband of her mother’s best friend when they met, died in 2002), she sold the big house and the cottages, and built a new “super-modern” house on the footprint of an old farm cottage, keeping about 50 acres. They are turning that land organic; at the moment it is all in clover, in every sense.
Farmer is just one of the lives Leith has tried on for size – having eventually cashed in on her hugely successful cookery school in 1993, her plan was to write novels, which was always her real vocation, she says. She has published eight, and has another half done, although for the first time in her life, she is pleased to note, the curse of needing to write seems to have faded. “The thing that has always kept me writing is that I have been itchy or unhappy not writing,” she says. “The current one isn’t bad, and I should keep going, but for the first time I don’t feel I need to…”
I guess that the stage show in which she tells stories from her life – not to mention her ongoing double act with Paul Hollywood on Bake Off – has satisfied some of that desire for self-expression. Her mother, Margaret Inglis, was a stage and screen actor and director, and ran a theatre company for many years in South Africa, where Leith grew up. Does she feel as if she is channelling her spirit these days?
“Not really,” she says. “I went to stage school, but I wasn’t much good, and then I went to Paris to study languages, and I fell in love with food. I wish my mum was alive though because she would be so astonished. The only time she ever commented on my work was when we went to a health spa together and the owner asked if I would do a talk to the other slimmers. My ma watched me do this little talk, and I thought I did all right, but afterwards the only thing she said to me was: ‘Darling, we really must get you voice trained.’”
It’s quite hard to imagine Leith lost for words, but as she confessed to Sue Lawley on an ancient Desert Island Discs, anxiety has sometimes led to her losing her voice – “my vocal cords are my achilles heel”. Has she overcome that?
“It happened to me when I was due to do a trial show in New York,” she says, “and I went to see this ‘voice doctor to the stars’. He gave me three white pills, at enormous expense. The next morning I woke up and my voice was fully restored.”
The only other time she dried, she says, was in the final show of her tour at the London Palladium in the summer. “By that time I was feeling quite confident. But the Palladium was too big and too many famous feet had stood there. I started off quite confidently and then I just completely lost where I was. Nothing came. But then what saved me was I had this completely amazing rush of rage. At myself. And I just found myself saying the thing that was in my head – ‘the Palladium is fucking terrifying!’ And of course everyone laughed, and after that I was fine again.”
Leith’s conversation with her audience takes in all of her life’s passions, her involvement with anti-apartheid protest in the South Africa of her youth, her ongoing love affair with food, and the related love affairs with sex – at one point in the show she recreates the gyrations of a workout video she made in the 1980s. (On an episode of Loose Women earlier this year, Leith enthusiastically endorsed the possibility of “libido injections” for older women. “Don’t give her any more,” her 76-year-old husband responded from the audience, “I’ll need reinforcements!”) The one subject she hasn’t quite found a way to work into Nothing in Moderation, however, is her campaign for voluntary euthanasia. “It’s hard to find a laugh there,” she says.
In some ways it seems an unlikely cause for someone so chock-full of life, but Leith insists it reflects the same positivity. She became involved when she witnessed her elder brother die an agonising death with bone cancer. “The trouble with that is, it doesn’t kill you, you have to wait for an organ to get it.” She made a powerful documentary with her son, the Conservative MP Danny Kruger, talking to people with terminal illness about their wishes. Mother and son disagreed about the right to end life.
Kruger was Boris Johnson’s political secretary. Do they agree on much else?
“Not many things,” she says. “Daniel wrote a very good book recently, Covenant, which sets out his beliefs. His basic idea is that we need to go back to greater personal responsibility, which I tend to agree with. But I don’t agree with his views on abortion, for example. He’s religious and he would say his moral stance is dictated by being a Christian. But I don’t think [believers in] God have any monopoly on goodness … I only voted Conservative once, ironically against Tony Blair [in 1997]. So you see how much I know…”
Those political disagreements do not get in the way of family harmony, she insists, however, as we are finishing our lunch. “I wasn’t a very good mother, always busy, but it’s about love really, isn’t it? If you love them and they love you, that’s the only important thing.” Leith’s Christmas this year – once the festive and new year editions of Bake Off are out of the way – will be with her son and his family in London, since her (adopted) daughter, Li-Da, is spending a few months visiting her native Cambodia. Her own contributions to the festivities are likely to include a “smashing trifle” made with “any cake that happens to be around”, jam rather than jelly, and “loads of booze”; and a signature Christmas pudding “basically vanilla ice-cream with a lot of crumbled up Christmas cake or pudding or mince pies mixed in” and frozen into a pudding shape. As with much of Leith’s life: what’s not to like?
The Great Christmas Bake Off will be broadcast on Christmas Eve and The Great New Year’s Bake Off on 1 January, both on Channel 4
