Prue Leith | The Spectator columnists & writers

Two and a half years ago I joined the Tory party to vote for Boris, then unjoined as soon as I could. I’ve never been a Tory voter but I believed in Boris and never thought of him as a cliquey, old-school Conservative. Now I’d like to rejoin to keep Liz Truss out. She seems to want to be PM just for the sake of being PM – we’ve had enough of that. But I’m hoist on my own petard. The party has wised up to tactical joining and you need to be a member for six months to vote. One of the many reasons we have a chronic staffing shortage, it’s said, is that Generation Z only want to do jobs that will protect their mental health, i.e. ones that aren’t too much like hard work. I’m not sure that’s the answer. I think hard work, and even a bit of stress, can sometimes be exactly what the doctor ordered.

I’m proud of my son Danny Kruger, but I don’t agree with him on abortion

Most of the time I have an easy time of it on social media, with tweeters being nice about my colourful attire, liking my cooking hacks or flowers. But this week I had a dose of toxic hate. My son, the MP Danny Kruger, was unwise enough to join a debate in the Commons, saying he didn’t think women should have complete ‘bodily autonomy’ in the case of abortion as there’s another body – the baby’s – involved. I don’t agree with him, any more than I agree with his stance on assisted dying. He’s anti, I’m in favour. But that’s fine. I still love and admire him. There’s more to him that the Twitter storm allows: he’s spent his whole career worrying about disadvantaged communities: as a student he led a convoy of vans full of blankets and medicines to Croatia, he spent ten years running a prison charity, as a policy wonk he’s always been mainly concerned with what is now called ‘levelling up', and now works for Michael Gove.

The problem with Boris going on Bake Off

Our plans for the Seychelles twice thwarted, we finally decide on Gozo, Malta. Afraid that the Insulate Britain brigade might have us miss our plane, we book a night at the Premier Inn next to Heathrow. We find it clad in scaffolding and the car park rammed. A row of cars stuffed with suitcases outside a hotel must be easy pickings for thieves, but we are too tired (lazy?) to lug the cases with us. Things look up inside: friendly receptionist, spotless room, nice cuppa in a comfy bed. We have a decent night’s sleep followed by breakfast at 5.30. Cheap hotels usually skimp on all-in breakfasts. But someone at the top of Premier Inn has decided quality counts, so the yoghurt is Yeo Valley, the muesli Kellogg’s, the ketchup Heinz, the jam Tiptree, the coffee Costa.

At last, a dose of up-close culture in London

In London for the first time in 18 months, I was as excited as a child on a birthday outing. We were desperate for a dose of up-close culture after months of Zoom, so we crammed in three exhibitions, two plays and a couple of first-class meals that I didn’t have to cook. Glorious. It helped that we had two of the few blue-sky days of this otherwise wretched summer and that I’d deliberately fallen off the wagon. My husband John says that I’m much nicer when I’m drinking. Apparently, when giving my kidneys a holiday, I’m altogether less joyful. We stayed at the Chelsea Arts Club in Old Church Street. It took ten years to persuade the club that cooking and writing are arts so it should accept me as a member — it prefers painters and sculptors.

The humble biscuit has a noble history

Sin-eating is an old European practice. After a person’s death, during the period of lying-in, a biscuit would be placed on the corpse in its coffin. Before the burial, one of the mourners would eat it in order to take on the sins of the departed and allow them to move on into the next life free of the burdens of their transgressions. Such fascinating info is the stuff of Lizzie Collingham’s book The Biscuit. This review, sadly, won’t touch on a tenth of it. Collingham has bagged a senior place among writers telling history through a single item of food. The book ranks up there with Salt and Cod by Mark Kurlansky. Her previous such book was Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, which I thought would be hard to match, but Collingham has pulled it off again.

Why is it that age limits never apply to men?

I’d never have thought I’d be good at doing nothing. Or rather walking the dogs, loafing in the sun, trying to match Paul Hollywood’s tête de brioche (third time of trying), doing jigsaws and reading hefty books. But I’m lovin’ it. The only thing that stresses me — indeed brings me out in lower-deck language most unbecoming to an octogenarian — is doing live shows or podcasts on Zoom or Skype while our broadband buffers, stutters or crashes. And some poor presenter is trying to fill the gap, desperate for me to make the technology work. Calls to Relate have tripled under lockdown I’m told because seeing too much of each other is seriously straining relationships. So I’m duly grateful that my husband John has risen to the lockdown challenge.

Women With Balls

The Prue Leith Edition

32 min listen

Women With Balls

The Prue Leith Edition

32 min listen

Prue Leith is a restaurateur, Bake Off judge, and advisor to the government's review on hospital food. On the podcast, she talks to Katy Balls about growing up in apartheid South Africa, how she got her first Michelin star, and having breakfast with Boris Johnson in Downing St.Prue Leith will be live in conversation with her nephew Sam Leith (the Spectator's Books Editor) and her niece Peta Leith on the 24th March. Get tickets here.

Prue Leith: My carbon footprint should put me in jail

I made the mistake of saying I thought insects might help feed the world. They are high-protein, cheap to farm (they breed like rabbits and grow like Topsy), require little water and energy and probably wouldn’t mind being factory-farmed. Now my post is full of mealworm powder and cricket flour and invitations to champion bug farms. Being an adviser to the hospital food review has been surprisingly uplifting. The panel members are mostly NHS professionals who are champing at the bit to improve matters and have already led changes in their own hospitals, so know it can be done. In one hospital, lunch was as good as the best home cooking. Yes, some hospital food is dire, and reform will be a huge task and take years.

Prue Leith: My plan to get real catering back into hospitals

Picture the scene: we are filming the opening link for The Great British Bake Off. Here I am in the woods, dressed in a lion suit; Paul Hollywood is the Tin Man, Sandi Toksvig the Scarecrow, and, guess what, Noel Fielding is Dorothy. I leap out on to the yellow brick road, roaring — I feel a hammer blow to my ankle, and end up whimpering like the Cowardly Lion I’m portraying. I have snapped my Achilles tendon. Danny the medic, who has had nothing more exciting than bakers’ cut fingers to deal with for three years, finally gets to use his ambulance, wheelchair and considerable skills. He doses me with painkillers and sticks my foot in a bucket containing more ice than water. Soon the agony of that has wiped out any injury pain.

From bitter loss to sweet relief: baking as therapy

This is a gentle, lovely book. It will, I’m sure, appeal to many an aspiring cook and baker, and should be read by anyone grieving for the loss of someone they loved. It is a memoir — each chapter ending with a recipe — covering a few years, from the sudden death of a beloved mother, through the author’s bleak, enveloping sorrow to a change of career, retraining as a pastry chef, and a love affair. At first, I found it unengaging. The stages of grief — denial, anger, resentment of other people’s happiness, manic displacement activity, exhaustion, sudden outbursts of either wracking sobs or unsuitable laughter — are well-written and honest, but too familiar, too predictable. (Though what did I want? Originality in grief?) But gradually I was drawn in to Olivia Potts’ almost obsessive love for her mother, and her ways of coping — or not coping — with her death.

A Cook’s Notebook

In the past few weeks, on three separate occasions, I have met three different women who for years (one for more than 30 years) volunteered for the Samaritans. All three have now quit. One, Sarah Anderson, said: ‘Chad Varah [the founder] must be spinning in his grave.’ The Samaritans has changed, they say. It still provides a vital service, being the only 24/7 helpline for potential suicides or other desperate people — but it’s become a one-number call-centre, where the call goes to the next available volunteer, probably hundreds of miles away. Face-to-face conversations are now rare, and they’ve given up their old ‘absolute confidentiality’ policy. Sarah has set up a new counselling service called The Listening Place, which refuses to share information with the authorities.

Table Talk

Prue Leith on her life through food and drink

25 min listen

Table Talk

Prue Leith on her life through food and drink

25 min listen

For our inaugural episode, Livvy and Lara are joined by Prue Leith: chef, restaurateur, broadcaster, journalist, novelist and, of course, Great British Bake Off presenter. They chat about her time in South Africa and Paris, and how that helped shape her attitude to food. She comes clean about some of her cooking mishaps, making sandwiches for both toffs and builders, being the first woman to have a proper restaurant in London, why she hates washing up, and her first cookbook in 25 years, Prue: My All-time Favourite Recipes.

Prue Leith: My favourite picture of all time

For this year's Christmas issue, several friends of The Spectator were asked which picture they’d choose to own. Here is Prue Leith's answer: Since it’s Christmas, my favourite picture of all time is Botticelli’s Avignon ‘Madonna and Child’ because the Virgin is so exquisite and touching. She can’t be more than 15, and there she is sitting elegantly upright in a heavenly blue robe and fancy headdress, absentmindedly playing with her baby, who, in common with most Renaissance infants, looks like a grumpy grown-up. But he does have the most adorable fat little feet. You long to squeeze his calves and tickle his toes. The reason I love this picture is because a reproduction of it hung on my bedroom wall when I was a child.

Prue Leith’s Christmas kitchen nightmares

Christmas in our family seems to guarantee tears and tantrums as well as jingle bells and jollity. Indeed, in my childhood, ‘feeling Christmassy’ meant feeling thoroughly overwrought or bad tempered, the antithesis of the ‘Christmas Spirit’. I think my father invented it when my mother, who was a terrible cook, spent all day making marmalade to give as Christmas presents and was then beside herself with anger when she burnt the lot. My earliest Christmas disaster was my first attempt at cake icing. I’d proudly come home from school with a Christmas cake. It was covered with smooth royal icing on which I’d painted the Three Kings — but I’d omitted the teaspoon of glycerine in the icing which would have stopped it drying to concrete.

My Christmas nightmares

The young people I meet give me hope for Brexit

I’m heartedly sick of hearing how feckless and selfish the young are. Maybe I move in enchanted circles, but I keep on meeting young people making a go of it, and frankly if they are the future, we should have no fear of Brexit. At Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Festival, there were (among the Glastonbury refugees selling henna tattoos, yoga classes and herbal remedies) new cheesemakers, butchers, jam- and pickle-makers, restaurateurs, furniture-makers and brewers, all having successful careers out of work they love. England now has more artisan cheeses than France. Last month I helped judge the first year of the British Charcuterie Awards and there were 443 entries, mostly start-ups by young people.

Diary - 27 September 2018

Is it just my age, or has summer always galloped past with indecent haste? No sooner do the reluctant leaves force themselves into the cold, like early morning runners, head down, braving the rain, than they are over, looking dusty and tired, turning yellow, spent. I know how they feel. My chief complaint is cramp. I don’t think anyone is researching cramp. It’s not life-threatening and so of no interest to big pharma or the medics. But it sure as hell interests me. Leaping up five times a night yelping as thigh, calf and foot take turns is torture. And before any kind reader suggests magnesium, salt, phosphorous, calcium, warm baths or stretching exercises, raw potatoes or used wine corks in bed (my mother’s dotty solutions), airline compression stockings, or any of the snake oils sold on the internet, I’ve done them and they don’t work.

The waiting game

When my husband, John, was born in 1946, doctors were the chief agents of adoption. His mother was young, single, pregnant and desperate. Her doctor had another patient, a happily married but childless woman in search of a baby. The doctor, knowing the two women, solved both their problems by handing John to his new parents at birth. Thirty years later I adopted my Cambodian daughter, Li-Da, with minimal fuss. We had a visit from a social worker to check us out. Within days a legal guardian was appointed, and we were allowed to foster Li-Da at once. After three months, with the occasional visit from her guardian, we adopted her. How very different it is today. The tortuous process Li-Da, now 43, and her husband are going through in search of a child to love makes me wonder if the whole thing doesn’t need a re-think.

Notebook | 12 April 2018

When Facebook and co stop selling on our details to third parties, will it be the end of spam? For half an hour every evening my otherwise chatty husband is lost to me as he deletes hundreds and hundreds of emails. My PA does the same, and so do I. The waste of time is criminal. But I doubt the spam will stop. If junk through the front-door mail box isn’t illegal, I guess junk through a virtual mailbox can’t be either. Grrr… Technology was supposed to save us time, remember? What a joke. It just frees you up to deal with more junk. Desperate for sun and time for me to get the final rewrite of a cookbook and a novel done, we looked for somewhere as near culture-free as possible. If there were any museums, art galleries, ancient buildings or sights to see, hubby John would have been in there like a shot, with me tagging along for fear of missing something.

The joy of Edinburgh

Edinburgh is a peach of a city, is it not? Last week, I walked up to the castle on a crisp and sunny morning. Crossing high above the railway line, I watched the trains slink out of Waverley station and snake along the valley floor, a giant Hornby set beneath my feet. The path to the castle is tarmacked and rough, but still slippery with morning frost, so I tread carefully as I follow the zigzag to stand under the castle walls at the top. A young man next to me breathes: ‘Awesome, man.’ Absolutely. And the more so when you think the volcanic plug on which the castle stands is riddled with passages dug to hold Napoleonic POWs. The view is awesome too. It always surprises me how frequently you glimpse the Firth of Forth from the city.

My ghastly Bake Off gaffe has led to some unexpected invitations

Who would have thought eating cake could bring one so much attention? Since my ghastly gaffe in revealing The Great British Bake Off winner, every quiz and comedy show invites me to join them to make a further ass of myself; McVitie’s, on hearing me say I didn’t care for Jaffa Cakes, sends me a box of them re-labelled Prue; I’m presented with wild necklaces and colourful glasses, and I get asked for selfies. Friends ask, don’t you hate that? No, I don’t. I guess if I were really famous, and couldn’t go anywhere without being mobbed, it would be horrible. But at my level, it’s flattering. And rather encouraging. This is an extract from Prue Leith's Winter Notebook, in the Christmas issue of the Spectator

Prue Leith: My convincing ghost story

My first husband, the writer Rayne Kruger, was friendly with Lord Armstrong, who owned Bamburgh Castle. In the 1950s, when Rayne was young and struggling, Lord Armstrong would lend him the castle keep as a bolthole in which to get on with his writing. He and his then wife had a cat called Gato. Every night when they sat in the sitting room, Northumbrian wind howling outside and waves crashing below, the cat, sleeping in front of the fire, would suddenly wake. At exactly the same time each evening, he’d stand up, back arched, hair on end, and his eyes would follow what Rayne swore must have been a cat-ghost, slowly walking round three sides of the room and then vanishing through the wall. It had to be a cat-ghost, he said, because Gato’s eyes followed his progress at skirting level, not human level.

Winter Notebook | 13 December 2017

Notebook | 5 October 2017

To Skibo Castle for a four-day wedding, a dream of super-luxury and great good fun. I was struck by how the American rich are saving the Highlands. Skibo is supported by a band of mega-wealthy Americans, some of whom have invested heavily in the nearest town of Dornoch, which is thriving as a result. They are following a great tradition: Andrew Carnegie, having made his fortune in the US, returned to Scotland and rebuilt Skibo. He also donated libraries and halls ‘big enough for dancing’ all over the world, many in Scotland. A great combo: reading and reeling. I live in the Cotswolds, where the rich often splendidly transform derelict farms and villages, only to be looked down on by the indigenous toffs who raise their eyes to heaven at the vulgarity of new stone walls and deep gravel.

Our big fat problem

The good news is that Theresa May has dropped the threat to withdraw universal free school meals. Thank God (and the PM) for that. School lunches are the biggest weapon we have to fight obesity. The UK is sixth in the supersize race of OECD countries, with a quarter of the population obese. The fact that six of the fattest nations (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and the UK) are English-speaking should tell us something about our food culture. But sadly even Japan and South Korea, the slimmest nations, are fattening up fast on burgers and chips. What is to be done? No country is going to have the courage to ban junk food, as they have drugs. Maybe we’ll come to that one day. We all know the NHS spends billions on diet-related illnesses, but did you know the fastest-growing surgical procedure in British hospitals is amputations, of which about half are due to diabetes? Can we afford the luxury of obesity? Seriously overweight people are generally less productive and consequently contribute less to the taxman.

Fad diets are just junk

Why do we do it? We really need to stop supporting the snake-oil industry. We know there is no such thing as a miracle diet, a magical health cure, a mystical practice or a strange (and always expensive) product that is going to make us youthful, happy and, above all, thin. When Planet Organic first opened in Westbourne Grove, it was a great shop, with a butcher, fishmonger and baker as well as a good range of veg and groceries. Now a third of the shop is shelf upon shelf of supplements, beauty preparations and diet books; another third is a café; and what meat and fish there is comes in vacuum packages. You can’t blame the owners. We are addicted to coffee and a cup of it nets the shop about £2 in profit. And they wouldn’t sell all those unnecessary supplements if we didn’t buy them.

Notebook | 27 April 2017

I’m an unashamed Archers fan. But for the first time in 50 years I’m exasperated by the storyline. A fortnight ago Usha, who has no ball sense, is justifiably rejected as a potential player by Ambridge’s cricket captain. Even she admits she’s useless. Nevertheless, bleating ‘sexist’ and ‘age-ist’, she leads a Lysistrata-style boycott, not of the marital bed, but of the practice nets. The women down bats and walk. Really! It’s enough to make you ashamed to be a feminist. And then last week the captain offers her the job of ‘inspirational team coach’. Laughable. Except for some reason I don’t laugh. I fume. Last weekend’s perfect foretaste, fingers crossed, of summer, had husband John dusting off his 1600cc Harley trike (rudely called his mobility scooter by his children).

Diary - 2 March 2017

A fortnight ago I got a taste of what being far too famous might feel like. A leak that I’m a contender for the Mary Berry slot on The Great British Bake Off morphed into the fake news that I’d got the job. For 24 hours it was a lead story — then it was yesterday’s non-news. My daughter, Li-Da Kruger, has made me her plus-one on the maiden voyage of Viking Sky, the swankiest cruise ship imaginable, all spacious showers, leather handrails and the surreal experience of sitting in the hairdresser’s with a roiling sea of black water and white-topped waves rushing past. Li-Da was booked to show her documentary Belonging to the passengers as part of the cruise’s ‘enrichment programme’. Her film is about going back to Cambodia to unearth the circumstances of her birth, her escape from the 1974 genocide and her ultimate adoption by my husband and me.

Diary - 13 October 2016

To Edinburgh to get married, but first my toyboy groom John Playfair (he’s a mere 69) shows me the city of his birth, which is peppered with his kinsman William Playfair’s neoclassical buildings. Outside the Chambers Museum there is a new, magnificent statue of him by Stoddard. We climb Calton Hill to admire the monument to another Playfair, this time the mathematician and astronomer John, and also his observatory, both built by W.H. Playfair. I’m now a bit daunted at joining the Playfair clan. Next day at sunset we drive as high as we can along Salisbury Crags and up Arthur’s Seat. It seems feeble not to climb the last bit. So up we go, me in high heels. It’s easier uphill than you’d think as the heels keep your feet horizontal but coming down they exaggerate the pitch and it’s impossible.

Today

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Monday

Wednesday

Monday

Thursday

Saturday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Sunday

Monday

Wednesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday