Great British Bake Off's Prue Leith reveals her secret to a happy marriage

Twice-wed Prue Leith reveals how she achieves domestic harmony with husband John, why she almost quit Bake Off and what really goes on in the show’s WhatsApp group…

The Great British Bake Off almost looked very different when it returned to our screens last month – it nearly lacked large statement jewellery, scarlet lipstick and primary-coloured glasses.

For if the show’s most colourful judge Prue Leith had had her way, she wouldn’t have been there at all. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying Bake Off,” she says. “I love it. But I needed a summer holiday.” So she wrote to producer Richard McKerrow and said: “You know I love you dearly but I’m going.”

However, Prue and Richard were due to see each other at the Cyprus wedding of fellow judge Paul Hollywood last year. So Richard suggested they discuss the matter properly when they met. “And we sat by the swimming pool and he said, ‘Why don’t you just do less and we’ll make sure you get a summer holiday?’” His compromise means that Prue, 84, will no longer present the show’s charity spin-off, The Great Celebrity Bake Off.

Would she have missed Bake Off if they had let her go? “No, no, no, I love Bake Off but it’s not my whole life,” says Prue, though she concedes that the competition has changed things. “It has given me eight years of enormous pleasure,” she grins. “And of course it’s given me lots of money, which is very helpful.”

And it’s clear she enjoys the company of the show’s presenters Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond, not to mention her fellow judge, Paul. “Every summer, I know I’m going to have a lot of fun because I will be with Paul, Noel and Alison. We are really good friends. We socialise quite a lot when we’re filming, we see each other out of work.

“And we have a WhatsApp group so we talk a lot. Usually we’re teasing each other. Paul was saying he saw me doing Prue’s Cotswold Kitchen showing my husband how to make flatbread. He indicated that I didn’t do it very well. But Paul and I have become closer over the last few years. At first, I just admired him, but I think we’ve grown fonder of each other.”

Was she intimidated by stepping into Mary Berry’s shoes back in 2017? “It wasn’t daunting, mainly because I didn’t realise the show had millions of viewers,” Prue confesses. “And although I knew Mary Berry and admired her, I had never watched it. So I wasn’t daunted until I walked into this enormous tent with eight cameramen and lots of soundmen and producers running around, runners and home economists. ‘Oh my God, this is terrifying!’

“But actually, it’s a very easy job for me because I don’t have to rehearse anything. I just walk on set and eat cake and say what I think. It’s a dream job. It’s the best job in television. I just felt it’s taking up too much of my summer and I needed a holiday.”

She spent that much-needed holiday in Uzbekistan, the choice of her “veteran traveller” husband, retired fashion designer, John Playfair. She waxes lyrical about its colourful history, “amazing” architecture and a beautifully restored mausoleum built by 14th-century conqueror Tamerlane.

The job and the holiday are both testament to remarkable energy levels. What’s her secret? “I think it’s good luck. My mother lived until 97 and she was pretty active. So I think it’s probably genes. I’m so lucky because a lot of people suffer ill health and it diminishes your enthusiasm. And I’ve had a great life. I eat well and sleep well – I can sleep anywhere.”

She gives an example of the day she modelled in a fashion show during London Fashion Week. “This was absolutely ridiculous but I was doing a fashion show for some friends. They are mad as hatters but I love them.” When Prue got bored of the inevitable wait to go onstage, she went outside, lay on her back on a bench, and “went straight to sleep. I had a good hour’s kip”.

She then strutted down the catwalk in a black latex dress, matching gloves and thick eyeliner. She’s certainly following her maxim of “life is for living”, mentioned in the introduction to her latest cookbook Life’s Too Short To Stuff A Mushroom, a phrase coined by Shirley Conran in her 1977 guide to household management, Superwoman. “The fact is I’m 84. Life is galloping past. When I look at travel programmes, I think, ‘Oh, I’d love to go there’. I open a book and think, ‘Oh, I’d like to visit that museum’.

“I know I’m not going to get all this done. It’s because I spend a lot of time in the kitchen but I want to do other things as well.” So naturally, her new book focuses on preparing delicious meals as efficiently as possible. “Most of these recipes are about shortcuts that don’t compromise quality,” she says.

Prue is also a fan of culinary hacks – subbing in packet custard instead of making it from scratch, buying puff pastry and using frozen sprouts at Christmas. It’s an admission that will strike a chord with many home cooks, not to mention the fact that, like many spouses, she and her husband of eight years (who lived separately for the first few years of their marriage) have different approaches to home life.

“My husband is amazingly untidy,” she says. “He likes to load the dishwasher just so, everything has to be in the right place. Then he just steps out of his trousers and there they are. Incredibly untidy. Then I just decided, ‘What does the clutter matter?’ Now I tidy up after him and I don’t care. I quite like tidying up anyway.”

(John, meanwhile, says that Prue’s most annoying trait is constantly scanning the room looking for something to tidy up.) This leads nicely into her secret of a happy marriage. “Find the right guy first,” she smiles. But she also advises tolerance. “A friend of mine said to me, ‘If something bugs you, don’t let it get to you’. Just think, ‘Is he worth it?’ And if he’s worth it then put up with it, he’s not going to change.”

With two children from her late first husband Rayne Kruger (who’d been married to her mother’s best friend), and 11 grandchildren between them, she says John is “like a clown entertainer for small children”. She also calls him a “machine freak” so, one Christmas, she bought him a tractor. He buys mini sports cars, quad bikes, motorbikes, and Segways for the grandchildren to play on in their garden.

“It’s a very good attraction because it means the children come and see us,” she says. “I planned the whole garden – we have these massive expanses of lawns and I want to rewild them. But he wants to keep them because it’s great for the kids to be buzzing around.” It all sounds idyllic. Who can blame her for wanting to spend a bit less time at work – or in the kitchen? She agrees. “I’ve been really lucky.”

Life’s Too Short To Stuff A Mushroom by Prue Leith, £25, (Carnival) is out now